INDUSTRY NEWS
TAYLORS TAKES GEOSPATIAL TECHNOLOGY-DRIVEN AUGMENTED REALITY MAINSTREAM Melbourne surveying firm Taylors is harnessing its expertise in geospatial technology to create not just added value for its clients, but for mainstream art lovers as well. The new platform, called Aura Vista AR, is the latest brainchild of Taylors Lab, an experimental and creative arm of the business aimed at bringing innovative solutions to life. The fruit of three years’ work, the Taylors team has created and designed this first-of-its-kind cloud-based augmented reality application, which allows artists to create fully immersive art exhibits for the public. The artworks superimpose a computergenerated image over a user’s view of the real world on their smartphone when triggered at a specific location. Premiering at Melbourne’s 2019 Fringe on the Arts Centre lawns and featuring work by local artist Richard Payne, AuraVista AR provides an opportunity for anyone to step into an AR world. The Taylors Lab itself, under the leadership of Taylors Managing Director Richard Cirillo, works at nurturing ideas across the entire spectrum of its talented staff, be they drone pilots, 3D visual artists, licensed surveyors, engineers or draftspersons. Together, they’ve worked on projects that include everything from computer vision and laser scanning, photogrammetry and holograms, to 3D interactive viewers and even a project management system. These mostly find a home in another part of the Taylors business, but every now and then one comes along they think can step outside their industry and bring their work to a wider audience. With 3D rendering and reality modeling being a key next-level service provided to Taylors’ clients, the creation of Aura Vista AR was the next logical step when it came to expanding on that technology and bringing it outside surveying and into the art world. “The launch of AuraVista AR is the result of years of ideation and cultivation in proving that spatially triggered AR is possible,” said Richard Cirillo. “We knew that our access to world-leading, geospatial technology could evolve to be shared with the broader community. We wanted to bring lasting, memorable AR experiences to life for all to see. We’re proud that AuraVista AR will connect curious minds with creative endeavours that need not be exclusive to just our industry and clients,” he added. But how does it work from a technical standpoint? As most good things are, it was a lot more difficult to take the idea from something on paper to a practical solution. Location in the context of Augmented Reality on a smartphone is the combination of the device’s native location services, a third-party plugin for improving that location over time, and then tying that in with the AR tracking to place the artwork as close to expected position as possible – usually within two metres. When taking scans of real-world objects to be brought into the digital world, Taylors uses a variety of survey-grade equipment as well as photogrammetry techniques. Aura Vista AR itself is built on the Unity3D game engine, using use both ARcore and ARkit to tie things into reality, as well as the device’s help to find a starting position.
6 Construction Engineering Australia • Oct/Nov 2019
The artwork itself is then brought to life by bringing the digital twin of the physical location – in this case Arts Centre lawns - into Tilt Brush VR, and the artist works inside that canvas. Then then it’s a matter of taking the resulting art piece out of Tilt Brush VR and placing it back into the original digital render. Taylors will soon support art created in Adobe and Autodesk, as well as Blender, Gimp and Google Blocks, making the platform as accessible as possible to both the artists and art lovers. In an exciting time in both app development and Augmented Reality where many people are coming at the problem from many different angles, it’s refreshing to see an Australian business, of surveyors and engineers no less, combining their technical expertise usually reserved for urban planning and construction, to a purely creative endeavour. For further information, please visit: www.taylorsds.com.au