Spatial Data Comparison for Markerless Augmented Reality (AR) Anchoring

The US Navy and Marine Corps are in the process of applying augmented reality (AR) technology to improve maintenance operations. However, existing technologies for registering the virtual space to the real world in order to display holograms rely on fiducial markers or cloud services. Fiducial markers serve as accurate anchors between the virtual and real space, but they are unusable in some cases, such as on sensitive material surfaces. Cloud services provide extra computational power not available on AR devices, but the upload of proprietary data poses a cyber security risk and the external processing may introduce unwanted lag time. Toyon proposes a real-time data processing system which enables the anchoring of AR headsets to target objects without needing modification of the object and without needing internet clouds services. The solution ingests AR headset scanning data (RGB-Depth and inertial measurement unit data streams), and matches the live mapping of target objects to stored CAD models or previously scanned data. While the technology is platform agnostic, Toyon proposes to target the Microsoft HoloLens in this development effort. The technology is designed to meet the Navy’s performance requirements and will be developed as a plug-and-play system to enhance Navy maintenance workflows.