Assessment of 3D Models Placement Methods in Augmented Reality

Augmented reality (AR) is a relevant technology, which has demonstrated to be efficient for several applications, especially in the architecture, engineering, construction and operation (AECO) domain, where the integration of building information modeling (BIM) and AR has proved to be optimal in handling construction projects. However, the main challenge when integrating a virtual 3D model in an AR environment is the lack of precision and accuracy of placement that can occur between the real and the virtual environments. Although methods for placement via AR have been reported in the literature, there is a lack of investigations addressing their evaluation. Therefore, this paper proposes a methodology to perform a quantitative and qualitative assessment of several AR placement methods and a discussion about their usability in the specific context of AECO. We adopt root mean square error (RMSE) to quantify the placement accuracy of a 3D model and standard deviation to examine its stability (jittering). The results revealed that the AR placement error range is extremely wide (from a few centimeters up to meters). In marker-based methods, the results showed centimeter-range in both indoor and outdoor environments, compared to other methods (Inertial, Marker-less, etc.), while marker-less methods have widely varying error range from centimeters to a few meters. Other commercial solutions based on placement-sensors (GNSS and IMU), such as Trimble SiteVision, have proven placement performance in manual mode with centimeter order, while for the automatic mode, the order of placement and stability is metric, due to the low coverage of RTX (real time extended) in the study area.