Augmented reality and GIS: On the possibilities and limits of markerless AR

Abstract

The application of Augmented Reality (AR) in the geo-spatial domain offers huge potentials: AR can visualize invisible properties of spatial entities, can display historic data for them, or can help in finding places. Whatever the application is, AR in the geo-spatial domain will often be purely sensor based, thus without the help of visual or sensory markers. In this paper we analyse the achievable accuracy of AR projections under everyday conditions with consumer hardware. We can show that AR can be applied in applications in smaller geographic scale, but is not sufficient if it comes to the preciseness required when inspecting infrastructural data of small scale.