Article of the Month -
July 2024
|
Interactive planning of GNSS monitoring
applications with Virtual Reality
Peter Bauer, Caroline Schönberger and
Werner Lienhart, Austria
This article was awarded the Survey Review Prize and
was presented during the FIG Working Week 2024 in Accra, Ghana.
FIG and Survey Review have
decided to award a paper presented at a
FIG Congress/Working Week. The Survey Review prize will be awarded
every two years to the author and presenter of a selected paper at a
FIG Congress/Working Week and will be limited to submissions from
authors who fulfil the FIG definition of a Young Surveyor.
Survey Review is an international journal which has been published
since 1931, and in recent years under the auspices of the Commonwealth
Association of Surveying and Land Economy (CASLE). It has been published
continuously as a quarterly journal, bringing together a wide range of
papers on research, theory, practice and management in land and
engineering surveying.
The paper selected for the prize passes through an initial reviewing
and revision stage overseen by FIG, before being judged by members of
the Editorial Board of Survey Review.
This year’s winner, “Interactive planning of GNSS monitoring
applications with Virtual Reality ” by Peter Bauer, Caroline Schönberger
and Werner Lienhart, Austria
SUMMARY
Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) are used in
challenging environments with increasing accuracy demands.
Therefore, many systematic effects become significant and
require a detailed planning of monitoring campaigns with
high integrity. In conventional GNSS planning software, the
local circumstances at the antenna locations are hardly
covered. Due to uniform cut-off angles in the elevation of
the satellite orbits the quality investigations are often
not representative at inhomogeneous areas (e.g. in the
vicinity of mountains or buildings).
In order to fulfil the requirements of modern deformation
analysis, the prediction of the satellite visibility and the
estimation of the point dilution of precision (DOP) is
improved by the usage of high-resolution 3D data. Nowadays,
with ray-tracing approaches from the entertainment sector,
3D computations can be easily carried out like in reality
based data capture or digital terrain models.
For this purpose, experimental software was developed using
Unity software to produce a human computer interface in a
Virtual Reality (VR) environment. The VR gear overcomes the
limitations of conventional 3D viewers in complex 3D
scenarios and provides the user an immersive and interactive
first-person view.
The software developed has been tested in a real-life use
case for the simulation of GNSS measurements at an Austrian
water dam. Furthermore, the predicted results of the
simulations have been validated by actual measurements taken
at the planned epoch at the site.
The full paper is available to read
here.
