UnityGeoAR: A geolocation Augmented Reality package for Unity3D
Kostas Cheliotis,
Fotis Liarokapis,
Margarita Kokla,
Eleni Tomai,
Katerina Pastra,
Niki Anastopoulou,
Maria Bezerianou,
Athanasia Darra,
Marinos Kavouras
Affiliations
Kostas Cheliotis
Laboratory of Cartography, School of Rural, Surveying and Geoinformatics Engineering, National Technical University of Athens, Greece; Corresponding author.
Fotis Liarokapis
CYENS - Centre of Excellence, Cyprus
Margarita Kokla
Laboratory of Cartography, School of Rural, Surveying and Geoinformatics Engineering, National Technical University of Athens, Greece
Eleni Tomai
Laboratory of Cartography, School of Rural, Surveying and Geoinformatics Engineering, National Technical University of Athens, Greece
Katerina Pastra
Institute for Language and Speech Processing, ATHENA Research Center, Greece
Niki Anastopoulou
Laboratory of Cartography, School of Rural, Surveying and Geoinformatics Engineering, National Technical University of Athens, Greece
Maria Bezerianou
Laboratory of Cartography, School of Rural, Surveying and Geoinformatics Engineering, National Technical University of Athens, Greece
Athanasia Darra
Department of Geography and Regional Planning, School of Rural, Surveying and Geoinformatics Engineering, National Technical University of Athens, Greece
Marinos Kavouras
Laboratory of Cartography, School of Rural, Surveying and Geoinformatics Engineering, National Technical University of Athens, Greece
Research interest in Augmented Reality (AR) has been steadily increasing in the past decades. However, while we see a wide range of publications implementing AR nowadays, it is often the case that the software is not included in the publication, leading to future research having to re-introduce similar custom AR solutions. We identify one such case, that of geolocated AR, which poses a deceptively complex issue, namely that of correctly aligning a virtual view with geo-referenced material around the user. We present here UnityGeoAR, a package for the widely used game engine Unity3D, that handles geolocation, reprojection, and AR view alignment through a minimal Application Programming Interface (API), in an effort to standardize geo-AR development and reduce development and implementation time for such a widely used aspect of AR.
