GeoAR: Getting Started

Lear how to make your AR application geographic-aware

This getting started tutorial provides the basic information so you can implement your own geographic-aware AR application.

The project we provide here is described in the IJGIS article GeoAR: A calibration method for Geographic-aware augmented reality, and it provides the means for all four calibration approaches described in the article.

Please, don’t forget to cite this article if you are using the framework:

Galvão, M. L., Fogliaroni, P., Giannopoulos, I., Navratil, G., Kattenbeck, M., & Alinaghi, N. (2024). GeoAR: a calibration method for Geographic-Aware Augmented Reality. International Journal of Geographical Information Science, 1–27. https://doi.org/10.1080/13658816.2024.2355326

The set-up we provide here is for the device Microsoft Hololens 2, but feel free to adpat the code to use in different devices.

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Basic requirements

In order to run and develop your GeoAR application using this project it is required the following:

  • AR device (Microsoft Hololens 2)
  • Unity Hub with Unity 2021.3.2f1 installed (adaptations for a later version of Unity might be necessary)
  • Microsoft Visual Studio
  • Mixed Reality Toolkit (MRTK) foundation package for Unity

If you do not have experience in developing with Unity or MRTK, we highly recommend you go throgh the following Microsoft training modules:

Introduction to the Mixed Reality Toolkit – Set Up Your Project and Use Hand Interaction

Introduction to mixed reality

1. Download and open the project in Unity

  1. Download the project folder and unpack it in your local machine
  2. Use Unity Hub to open the project folder GeoARUnityProject (make sure you have the right version installed)
  3. If everything is correct, you will be able to play the application in the game mode.

2. Undestating the application user interface and using the menus in game mode

Attention: If you cannot see the digital landmarks (white columns) after clicking the button to load the geo-scene, try removing and importing the file scene1.xml into the Assets/Ressource folder again!

3. Understanding the scene game objects and the scripts

Attention: If you cannot see the digital landmarks (white columns) after clicking the button to load the geo-scene, try removing and importing the file scene1.xml into the Assets/Ressource folder again!

4. Deploying and running the application into Hololens 2

5. Performing the loation-based GeoAR calibration

[Coming soon]

6. Performing the fixed-points GeoAR calibration

[Coming soon]

7. Using Azure Anchors to reuse your GeoAR calibration

[Coming soon]