Mixed Reality Toolset For Onsite Processes In Construction and Manufacturing Industries
Premi, Aditya (2022)
Premi, Aditya
2022
Master's Programme in Automation Engineering
Tekniikan ja luonnontieteiden tiedekunta - Faculty of Engineering and Natural Sciences
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Hyväksymispäivämäärä
2022-09-27
Julkaisun pysyvä osoite on
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:tuni-202208256736
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:tuni-202208256736
Tiivistelmä
In traditional and labour-intensive industries, such as construction and manufacturing, every time a task must be repeated, it not only affects the schedule but also increases costs. Site visits to collect information, during the early stages of the project, are very crucial as this information is used to create plans and budgets. Furthermore, a large percentage of the existing factories and buildings are not digitally documented. Many buildings may also have outdated 2D designs. Therefore, a key problem during site planning is the collection of accurate data. Evidently, there is a lack of modern technological tools that ensure that the reality is consistent with the virtual
planning data.
Augmented Reality (AR) technology can digitalise the process of site information collection and related tasks such as visualisation of 3D designs. Various other capabilities of AR, with smart glasses such as Microsoft HoloLens, include scanning, measurement, interactions of virtual objects with the real world and location aware textual notes. This thesis explores the capabilities of AR with smart glasses such as HoloLens, by first understanding the needs of the industries along with identifying ways in which AR can digitalise industry processes and developing necessary tools to enable the same.
The Unity3D engine is used to carry out the development work and the resultant tools are implemented on HoloLens. These functionalities are developed keeping in mind principles of user experience. They allow the user to capture the space around them as a 3D mesh, measure distances between objects in that space or with virtual objects that have been placed, interact with various models by moving them or even slicing them to meet the user’s requirements and creating annotations in different parts of the working space.
The developed tools were then tested in the industry case study with Fortum. Here it was verified that the newly developed tools met most of the requirements. However, each company may have their own set of requirements and may need more customised AR solutions to fix them. This observation resulted in the development of an AR toolset that provides different functionalities to the user. This enabled the leveraging of user knowledge of the situation and maximising the strength of AR technology while solving the problem.
planning data.
Augmented Reality (AR) technology can digitalise the process of site information collection and related tasks such as visualisation of 3D designs. Various other capabilities of AR, with smart glasses such as Microsoft HoloLens, include scanning, measurement, interactions of virtual objects with the real world and location aware textual notes. This thesis explores the capabilities of AR with smart glasses such as HoloLens, by first understanding the needs of the industries along with identifying ways in which AR can digitalise industry processes and developing necessary tools to enable the same.
The Unity3D engine is used to carry out the development work and the resultant tools are implemented on HoloLens. These functionalities are developed keeping in mind principles of user experience. They allow the user to capture the space around them as a 3D mesh, measure distances between objects in that space or with virtual objects that have been placed, interact with various models by moving them or even slicing them to meet the user’s requirements and creating annotations in different parts of the working space.
The developed tools were then tested in the industry case study with Fortum. Here it was verified that the newly developed tools met most of the requirements. However, each company may have their own set of requirements and may need more customised AR solutions to fix them. This observation resulted in the development of an AR toolset that provides different functionalities to the user. This enabled the leveraging of user knowledge of the situation and maximising the strength of AR technology while solving the problem.