MIXED REALITY APPLICATION FOR STAIRCASE INSPECTION

Abstract

Mixed Reality (MR) solutions for the construction industry have been studied, with many bringing in a Building Information Model (BIM) within the mixed reality environment for visualization to assist with inspections. While some studies have been done to determine the efficiency of mapping indoor scenes using mixed-reality headsets, few have conducted research for specific applications that utilize the mapping capabilities of mixed-reality hardware. In the construction industry, building authority standards have to be complied with, which are typically manually inspected. Wearable mixed reality solutions could potentially be used to facilitate such inspections by using native sensors available in the hardware to make sense of the environment, followed by a comparison of the acquired data against a set of authority requirements. The objective of the research is to study the feasibility of utilizing a wearable mixed reality device as a tool for building staircase inspection, where such inspections are usually tedious since it involves manual measurements of several staircase parameters. Using data gathered from sensors on the device, holograms representing staircase features are generated for visualization and computing distance measurements, which are then used for checks against a set of standards. Due to hardware limitations, the application was only able to gather and analyze data for parts of staircases with reasonable accuracy. Nonetheless, the mixed reality application showed that simpler structures with fewer features than staircases can be successfully deployed for measurement-type inspection checks.