Implementing augmented reality technology to measure structural changes across time
This work addresses the need for efficient and intuitive structural health monitoring for building inspectors, particularly after seismic events, but it appears incremental as it applies existing AR technology to a known domain.
The paper tackles the problem of quantifying structural changes over time for building inspections by proposing the Time Machine Measure (TMM) application on an AR head-mounted device, which overlays past meshes onto the real environment to measure deformation, and it was verified through experiments simulating real-world inspections.
In recent years, augmented reality (AR) technology has been increasingly employed in structural health monitoring (SHM). In the case of conditions following a seismic event, inspections are conducted to evaluate the progression of the damage pattern quantitatively and efficiently respond if the displacement pattern is determined to be unsafe. Additionally, quantification of nearby structural changes over short-term and long-term periods can provide building inspectors with information to improve safety. This paper proposes the Time Machine Measure (TMM) application on an Augmented Reality (AR) Head-Mounted-Device (HMD) platform. The main function of the TMM application is to restore the saved meshes of a past environment and overlay them onto the real environment so that inspectors can intuitively measure structural deformation and other movement across time. The proposed TMM application was verified by experiments meant to simulate a real-world inspection.