ISPRS-Archives The International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences ISPRS-Archives Int. Arch. Photogramm. Remote Sens. Spatial Inf. Sci. 2194-9034 Copernicus Publications Göttingen, Germany 10.5194/isprs-archives-XLVIII-4-W4-2022-101-2022 RESOLVING PERCEPTUAL CHALLENGES OF VISUALIZING UNDERGROUND UTILITIES IN MIXED REALITY Muthalif M. Z. A. 1 Shojaei D. 1 Khoshelham K. 1 Dept. of Infrastructure Engineering, The University of Melbourne, Parkville Victoria 3010, Australia 14 10 2022 XLVIII-4/W4-2022 101 108 Copyright: © 2022 M. Z. A. Muthalif et al. 2022 This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this licence, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This article is available from https://isprs-archives.copernicus.org/articles/XLVIII-4-W4-2022/101/2022/isprs-archives-XLVIII-4-W4-2022-101-2022.html The full text article is available as a PDF file from https://isprs-archives.copernicus.org/articles/XLVIII-4-W4-2022/101/2022/isprs-archives-XLVIII-4-W4-2022-101-2022.pdf

Augmented reality (AR) is intensely explored due to its wide range of potential applications, from education and engineering to medicine and defense. Nevertheless, utilizing AR for visualizing underground utilities still faces a number of challenges, including the unavailability of reliable, readily accessible digital information about underground utilities, localization of AR devices in a GNSS-deprived environment, and visual perceptual challenges. This paper discusses the utilization of Mixed reality (MR) to address the visual perceptual challenges, which can provide a realistic visualization and convenient user experience compared to AR. Six MR visualization prototypes have been developed, namely, "General view", "General + Range view", "General + Elevator view", "X-Ray box view", "X-Ray box + Depthslider view", and "X-Ray + box + Clipping view", and they are deployed to Microsoft HoloLens 2 for testing purposes. These new MR visualization methods can potentially resolve AR's visual perceptual challenges for visualizing underground utilities.