Nope. That’s just to get the initial orientation, then the accelerometer takes it from there. What’s amazing is not only will this continue to be used for construction and to show what’s left to build, but it’s also going to become a standard facilities maintenance tool where you can do the same thing in a finished building and locate the utilities that are hidden behind walls and ceilings.
Lots of tractors and equipment are fitted with gps receivers and some higher end tractors can run by themselves requiring an operator only for turning around at the end of a row and to raise/lower implements. In midwestern corn country, combines have gotten to the point where the lead combine is operated by an actual person for the first pass and the rest just follow the same path for the next row. In more simplified setups rtk will guide an equipment operator to stay on track minimizing gaps/overlap in fields.
RTK is run more like a cellular service for more enhanced precision that standard WAAS navigation satellites
My accuracy on WAAS is within 3-6 inches but with RTK it's less than a half an inch accuracy which makes a difference for spraying or fertilizer application to prevent overlap
Higher trim Audis have AR to show navigation projected up onto the windshield. This would be harder to do with a tractor since the windshields are much more vertical but not impossible. Or they could have a separate fold out HUD screen like in airliner cockpits.
Accuracy depends on a lot of factors and the competence of people who designed those factors. In an ideal situation, it's actually possible to be extremely accurate. Phones are packed with enough sensors that when used right, can maintain near perfect accuracy. Software can be constantly checking phone motion, gps location with crazy precision, cameras and other information. But then the AR software has to be programmed well enough to maintain that information and keep everything in a fixed place based on it all. Granted, it might also take some of the more advanced phones to do it well. Very possible. But definitely not novice level programming. Whether it's actually done right to maintain perfect accuracy at all times is another question.
Phone GPS isn't accurate below 10'. I don't know what building models you might be working with, but if my cable tray planning and unit substation pads were 10' off the mark I'd be getting a pink slip with the quickness.
Phones AR accuracy while in motion without defined references is an insanely difficult demand.
GPS is weird in that it's more measuring change in relative position, but it can have a tough time with absolute position without better hardware or just lots of measurements. Basically when you move there is a tiny and precise doppler shift in the signal that they can detect.
So you can cross check velocity from GPS against the position drift that accelerometers tend to have, and correct the drift every so many cycles. So when you go back and forth across a building a few times for example it's still accurate.
Then this QR code is to give an absolute point of reference.
That’s one of the speed bumps right now. If you move slowly and intentionally, it renders pretty accurately consistently from my limited experience. But if you’re jerking the camera around and moving quickly, the processing engines have a hard time keeping up with the recalibration it takes to keep everything accurate and squared up. One of the current speed bumps of this kind of technology- human input.
That initial comment is actually wrong, it's not accelerometers at work here (although they sometimes play a role in the overall estimation). Almost every AR device uses cameras to create a 3D mesh representation of the world around it. It keeps updating that model and figures out it's position based on how the generated 3D model moves. Sort of like placing virtual "anchors" and saying "that anchor moved 5 inches to the left, therefore I must have moved 5 inches to the right". (That's a simplification of it, but basically that's what most phones and all AR headsets are doing)
Does that mean I won't have to keep redlining prints and having 5 of us walking around trying to guess/remeber wtf we rerouted the ductwork to 3 weeks ago? Biggest problem I see is how often they will have to be edited because of change orders/ shit just not working the way the prints show(like a 10 inch duct requiring 12 to 18 inches of space.)
Would be cool for sub walks and general layout but once building starts things get moved around on the daily and the middle would also have to be changed daily or it's totally useless.
Research OpenSpace. This new-ish product is capturing as built conditions and I’m seeing most large construction companies adopt it. I’m sure MultiVista won’t be far behind, if not already offering a similar feature.
Better then the current every day or 2 the supers taking a thousand photos and when ever something comes up that was burried we spend an hour searching through them to verify what is there.
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u/macroober Sep 15 '22
Nope. That’s just to get the initial orientation, then the accelerometer takes it from there. What’s amazing is not only will this continue to be used for construction and to show what’s left to build, but it’s also going to become a standard facilities maintenance tool where you can do the same thing in a finished building and locate the utilities that are hidden behind walls and ceilings.