BIM-Powered Augmented Reality for Advancing Human-Building Interaction

The shift from computer-aided design (CAD) to building information modeling (BIM) has made the adoption of augmented reality (AR) promising in the field of architecture, engineering and construction. Despite the potential of AR in this field, the industry and professionals have still not fully adopted it due to registration and tracking limitations and visual occlusions in dynamic environments. We propose our first prototype (BIMxAR), which utilizes existing buildings' semantically rich BIM models and contextually aligns geometrical and non-geometrical information with the physical buildings. The proposed prototype aims to solve registration and tracking issues in dynamic environments by utilizing tracking and motion sensors already available in many mobile phones and tablets. The experiment results indicate that the system can support BIMand physical building registration in outdoor and part ofindoor environments, but cannot maintain accurate alignment indoor when relying only on a device's motion sensors. Therefore, additional computer vision and AI (deep learning) functions need to be integrated into the system to enhance AR model registration in the future.