Enabling Augmented Reality in less than 5 minutes

Written by Andy Hird who is the Managing Director for address management specialist Aligned Assets

Enabling Augmented Reality – Turning your data into AR in less than 5 minutes

In recent blogs we have highlighted the potential for Augmented Reality (AR) due to the significance of Ordnance Surveys AddressBase product and the use of the Unique Property Reference Number (UPRN).  In case you missed those blogs…

Aligned Assets adopt Augmented Reality

Augmented Reality gives you superpowers!

80% of Data is Geographic…Not This Again – AR and the UPRN

In recent conversations I’ve had with people interested in in Symphony AR, they have understandably assumed that introducing it would take a lot of work to implement and that it seemed out of reach and in the distant future for them. In this blog I want to share with you how can use our Symphony Location Manager to allow an organisation to display its geographic data as augmented reality and how quickly and easily it can be adopted by any organisation with geographic data.

Within your organisation it’s likely that you will have location based data, for instance a list of addresses or in the case of councils and emergency services you will have a multitude of GIS data. This data will need to have a coordinate associated with it however. In the UK that could be a British National Grid Easting and Northing or for the rest of the world a latitude and longitude. If you don’t have this already it is possible to obtain this through a process called Geocoding. You can use matching software Like iMatch or software from other suppliers.

In this example we are going to be looking at a Listed Building dataset which is one of the layers that South Kesteven District Council’s hold as a GIS layer. It is important to highlight here that symphony Location Manager will allow a user to

1. Load the data into a database
2. Create a schedule to load the data
3. Define how the data should be formatted and viewed
4. Configure what users should be able to see this data from the mobile AR application.
5. Create a schedule to publish the data in different GIS formats.

For the purposes of this blog we are going to skip straight to step 3 (defining how data should be formatted and viewed)

Once a dataset is ‘loaded’ it can be formatted so the mobile application can render that information in a consistent manner to the user despite what data fields exist.

In the following screenshot you can see that we have used a standard GIS mapping application to help visualise the data and its fields.

The Symphony Location Manager application has a powerful but easy to use View Builder which allows you to map the underlying datafields to specific locations within the Symphony AR mobile application.  Typically this step takes around a minute.

Once you are happy with your field mappings you can chose to validate the data and return it so you can see how its being formatted.  If you are not happy or want to make changes simply repeat.

Once you save the View Builder wizard you would then configure which users should see this newly created view (we won’t cover that in this blog but again it takes just a minute).  Finally the users out in the field can get to use this newly created view like the following screenshots show

In this blog we have focused on some of the basic capabilities of the Software we provide. Within minutes any organisation can take a dataset and make that available for staff or its customers as augmented reality. There are endless possibilities for presenting your data and we would be more than happy to discuss opportunities further with you.