DEVELOPMENT OF AUGMENTED REALITY PIPELINE VISUALISER (ARPV) APPLICATION FOR VISUALISING UNDERGROUND WATER PIPELINE

Abstract. Underground utilities locating is an important process to identify buried utility facilities for inspection and maintenance purposes. The process involves the use of underground utility maps and detecting devices to identify utilities as well as paints to mark the positions. However, this practice requires sophisticated devices, and skilful and experienced workers. The whole process takes time and is costly to operate. To solve these difficulties, an easy to use Augmented Reality (AR) mobile application, namely AR Pipeline Visualiser (ARPV) was developed. ARPV has feature for identifying pipelines which allows their attributes to be displayed. Besides, it also comes with colour classification buttons based on the pipelines’ attribute values which help users to discriminate pipelines better. ARPV uses spatial data in GeoJSON format which is hosted on Mapbox’s online database. ARPV is developed using Unity3D engine and Mapbox SDK for Unity. ARPV utilizes smartphone’s sensors to determine the location and orientation of the device, then, render the corresponding pipelines graphics on top of the reality scene through camera and screen. A qualitative testing with an engineer from Pejabat Harta Bina, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia shows that the application has an advantage in providing better visualisation and understanding of water pipeline than conventional method.