Points Of Interest

One of the classical types of spatial content is “Points of Interest” (POI’s). They are part of our daily lives when we use online maps on our smartphones to navigate the world. Although they come in many variations a “point of interest” (POI) is a location for which information is available. It could be information about a bus stop, a famous statue, an entrance to a building or even the location of an imaginary object like a “gym” in the game Pokemon Go.

Incompatible formats and proprietary solutions is the current reality

When working with POI data one of the biggest challenges is that such data had not been standardized outside of limited industry verticals. There are no universal standards that cover all types of POI data that any publisher or consumer of such data could leverage. Large companies can afford at great cost to aggregate different types of POI data from all sorts of sources in all sorts of formats and store them in their own proprietary systems such as in leading digital maps.

OSCP support for a POI standard from the Open Geospatial Consortium

Key volunteers within OARC have been contributing to standardization efforts in the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) to develop a universal open standard for encoding POI data. We intend to implement support for this new standard to be used with our OSCP Content Discovery Service.

Note:

This demonstration includes all aspects of the demonstration created and shown in Delft during the 128th OGC Member Meeting, however, also represents an additional layer of interoperability and a third OSCP compliant client.

GeoPose & POI Interoperability Demos in Montreal

Purpose of the demonstrations:

These demos show how different Augmented Reality Clients are able to visualize geospatially-anchored content and leverage an existing open standard (OGC GeoPose 1.0 Data Exchange Standard) together with another open standard under development
(OGC Points of Interest (POI) Conceptual Model Standard). This requires implementations both on the client- and server-side. Two of the clients involved in the demonstration ask for a GeoPose estimate from an OSCP GeoPose Service and the third one localizes against a geopose-encoded QR code.

Information about the standards can be found here:

OGC GeoPose Data Exchange Standard 1.0 

Draft OGC Points of Interest (POI) Conceptual Data Model Standard

Information about the OSCP services that are used to localize and find content are found here:

https://github.com/OpenArCloud/oscp-geopose-protocol

https://github.com/OpenArCloud/oscp-spatial-content-discovery

How does the demo work?

  1. There is a VPS (Visual Positioning Service) provider, a content publishing platform and three smartphone spatial browser clients involved in this demo. These are:

    1. VPS Service Provider:

      1. Augmented City provides Geopose estimates to the spatial browser apps. Augmented City is a member of Open AR Cloud and its VPS service is compliant with OGC standards.

    2. Content Publishing Platform:

      1. MyGeoVerse spatial content management platform by XR Masters includes the MyGeoVerse spatial browser mobile client app, capable of publishing 3D GLB assets and creating 3D POIs, all compliant with OGC standards. XR Masters is a member of Open AR Cloud.

    3. Three Spatial Browsers:

      1. SpARcl Webxr spatial browser, a web browser by Open AR Cloud,

      2. MyGeoVerse spatial browser, a native app by XR Masters,

      3. Ethar spatial browser, another native app by Ethar. Ethar is a member of Open AR Cloud.

  2. Both MyGeoVerse and spARcl clients can connect to an OSCP GeoPose service using the Visual Positioning (VPS) implementation from Augmented City. This service is referred to as the GeoPose VPS server. Both clients send camera images and metadata to the GeoPose VPS server and receive their GeoPose estimates in return. Ethar, on the other hand, localizes using a GeoPose encoded QR code. The GeoPose is obtained from Augmented City's GeoPose VPS server via the MyGeoVerse spatial browser to ensure that the Ethar spatial browser operates within the same coordinate system as the other two apps.

  3. With GeoPose estimates, the clients should have an accurate understanding of the smartphone's real-world position and orientation (GeoPose).

  4. The clients queries POI services and OSCP Content discovery services to learn if there is any content at real world locations near the user that can be displayed.

  5. If such content exists the clients display the content from different providers correctly at the real world position where the content is intended to be.

Location

The locations for these demonstrations:
In front of Centre Mont-Royal Building
2200 Mansfield St Montreal

Follow the steps below to first create a POI and to place a 3D OGC Logo at your location using
MyGeoVerse spatial browser app. (Steps 1 to 5)
Then view the content you placed using the three browser apps: MyGeoVerse, Ethar (Step 6) and spArcl (Step 7).

If you are at Montreal, you can try the demos yourself!

Step 1:

Send an email to both accounts below:
tester@xr-masters.com and
info@ethar.com
and include your Apple ID e-mail address and request invitation for the TestFlight app versions of the spatial browser apps.
(Please look at step 7 for instruction on how to use spARcl Webxr browser)

Step 2:

You will receive invites from both companies (MyGeoVerse and Ethar) TestFlight accounts and once you accept the invites, you will be able to install the two browser apps.

Step 3:

Open the MyGeoVerse App and register.
Then, go to the demo area and localize by clicking the “Start” button

Step 4:

Once localized, click the “Plus” sign to see the content database. Write “OGC” on the search field and click on the OGC (GLB) logo and hit the “Select”button.
Then tap the screen to place the logo at your desired location.

Step 5:

Select “Create POI” on the app menu and tap to place the POI at your desired location. Then, fill in the form about the POI you would like to create.
When you are done hit “Create”.

Congratulations, you have created a POI and placed an OGC Logo.

Now, you can restart MyGeoVerse and view the content you created, hopefully, at the exact location you placed them. If so, you can now move onto the next steps and view the same content using the Ethar spatial browser and spARcl Webxr web browser.

Step 6:

Open Ethar spatial browser and scan the QR code that is posted by the OGC team.
Once you localize against this QR code, you can turn around and view the content you placed using MyGeoVerse.

Next step is to view the same content using the spARcl client.

Step 7:

Follow the instructions below to view the same content with spARcl!