Integration of Augmented Reality and Indoor Positioning Technologies for On-Site Viewing of BIM Information

This study applied integrated indoor positioning and augmented reality (AR) technologies to develop an on-site viewing model of BIM. In the proposed model, BIM information is displayed and superimposed on real building elements in 3D component models or surrounding texts using AR technology. The building must have a wireless network environment inside, and each room uses the same set of markers to mark up the building elements in the room. The system uses wireless access points for indoor positioning to identify the user’s location in the room, and then uses markers to identify the building elements in the room. Once a building element is identified, the system retrieves the 3D model or property information from a Cloud-based BIM database and then superimposes them on a view of real building elements. A prototype system was developed based on the proposed model using the WorldViz Vizard platform. The proposed system achieved the integrated display of virtual BIM and real on-site scenes on a head-mounted display (HMD) without manual navigation for model viewing.