From the Paper to the Tablet: On the Design of an AR-Based Tool for the Inspection of Pre-Fab Buildings. Preliminary Results of the SIRAE Project

• Main Authors: Cristina Portalés, Sergio Casas, Jesús Gimeno, Marcos Fernández, Montse Poza
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2018-04-01
• Series: Sensors
• Subjects: Augmented Reality; pre-fab buildings; inspection; energy efficiency
• Online Access: http://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/18/4/1262

Energy-efficient Buildings (EeB) are demanded in today’s constructions, fulfilling the requirements for green cities. Pre-fab buildings, which are modularly fully-built in factories, are a good example of this. Although this kind of building is quite new, the in situ inspection is documented using traditional tools, mainly based on paper annotations. Thus, the inspection process is not taking advantage of new technologies. In this paper, we present the preliminary results of the SIRAE project that aims to provide an Augmented Reality (AR) tool that can seamlessly aid in the regular processes of pre-fab building inspections to detect and eliminate the possible existing quality and energy efficiency deviations. In this regards, we show a description of the current inspection process and how an interactive tool can be designed and adapted to it. Our first results show the design and implementation of our tool, which is highly interactive and involves AR visualizations and 3D data-gathering, allowing the inspectors to quickly manage it without altering the way the inspection process is done. First trials on a real environment show that the tool is promising for massive inspection processes.