VRsurv: A virtual planning and educational tool for surveying tasks

Today’s typical surveying tasks, like staking out or monitoring, take place in a dynamic and fully 3D environment with many dependencies on other objects. Obstructions and disturbances of the line of sights must be foreseen often at a very early stage of a project. Also, the high precision of modern surveying instruments requires a detailed evaluation of systematic effects
to fulfil nowadays accuracy demands.
In order to compete with these requirements, the planning environment for modern geodetic network design needs to be in 3D and object orientated to cover the relations and dependencies between relevant object groups within the monitoring scenario. Moreover, it should be capable of processing meshed reality capture data sets and design models from architects to serve as a
basis for feasibility studies of the concept.
Such a geodetic 3D planning tool is realized with the experimental software VRsurv at the Institute of Engineering Geodesy and Measurement Systems (IGMS) of Graz University of Technology. Fully operational virtual surveying equipment can be placed in an interactive 3D environment. Therefore, a modelled total station can turn and steer onto prisms and the line of sight is automatically checked for obstructions, optimal prism orientation or automatic aiming
issues.
Technologies from the entertainment industry have been applied on geodetic task to perform quality checks in near real time. The software was developed in the coding environment Unity with the usage of Virtual Reality (VR) technology as a human computer interface. The VR gear should overcome the limitations of conventional 3D viewers in complex 3D scenarios and
provide the user an immersive first person view on the data. The usage of VR is also beneficial for educational purposes in student courses.