VIDENTE – What lies beneath? A new approach of locating and identifying buried utility assets on site

This outdoor showcase features VIDENTE – an outdoor handheld solution enabling users to gain a glance at the underground infrastructure in their immediate environs. By combining mobile augmented reality (AR) and common wide area tracking technologies VIDENTE provides an enhanced vision of the road surface telling precisely where buried utility assets are situated beneath. The novel approach proposed by VIDENTE demonstrates how accurate underground city models embedded in a location aware context may contribute to successful accomplishment of common field tasks at utility and infrastructure companies. In order to provide an authentic experience of VIDENTE the showcase will employ real-world data retrieved from the operational geospatial database of the local power supplier Salzburg AG. 1 Topic of the showcase This showcase will provide an insight into a novel approach of rapidly locating and identifying hidden underground utility network assets such as cables and pipes in the field. We will present VIDENTE – an outdoor handheld augmented reality system (Fig. 1), which has been developed over the past two years within the scope of a research cooperation of GRINTEC and TU Graz and is now available as a fully functional prototype. VIDENTE is designed to assist field staff of utility and infrastructure companies in their everyday work tasks related to maintenance, outage management, asset record keeping and network planning. By means of augmented reality (AR) and advanced wide area tracking technologies such as GPS and inertial measurement systems VIDENTE provides users with an intuitive visualisation of the local underground infrastructure on a handheld device. That real-time visualisation is achieved by merging continuously streamed video footage of the user’s current environs Fig. 1: VIDENTE handheld augmented reality client platform Fig. 2: Screenshot of a mobile augmented reality visualisation of underground utility assets (“virtual digging hole”)