RAISE Experiment – Augmented Reality Smart Guidance Application based on Edge Computing

Margherita Facca

The RAISE experiment implemented a novel application that offers enhanced guidance in urban environments and live AR video streaming. It started in November 2018 and during its 6-month duration, RAISE produced remarkable results for the sectors personalized AR experience that connects the digital content with the physical world.

The RAISE innovative application makes use of the FLAME MEC infrastructure to achieve faster access to media and services, lower latency, and higher embracement of the experience. In this direction, RAISE leverages on the FLAME wireless access infrastructure of the city of Barcelona, which offers a real deployment of an intelligent edge network (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: The RAISE experience

More specifically, RAISE provides personalized AR experience that connects the digital content with the physical world in order to empower 3D navigation, real-time geotagging and geofencing, as well as launching of advertisements and multimedia when the user is at specific outdoor places around the city (see Figure 2 for the RAISE main breakthroughs).

Figure 2: Technical benefits of RAISE experiment

Figure 3 presents the cycle between the capturing of a camera frame until its augmented visualization using the MEC server facility. At the beginning, the smartphone collects frames at a specific frame rate, and send them together with GPS/IMU data to the edge server. The initial location estimation and camera orientation is performed once at the edge server, and then user and camera pose tracking takes place. According to the annotations stored to the geodata base, augmentations are rendered to the video frames and then the video is sent back to the user to be displayed in the smart phone. The annotations provide information about the surrounding environment (e.g., buildings, shops, monuments, etc.), as well as navigation guidelines. The process of adding and removing annotations to the geodata base which is a similar process, is not illustrated here in the interest of brevity.

Figure 3: RAISE block diagram of AR augmentations rendering
RAISE Objectives

To summarize, RAISE experiment targeted to the following key objectives:

  • To design and develop a system architecture that encompasses the RAISE functionalities in order to deliver AR content to the end user, enhanced by the MEC features offered by FLAME.
  • To develop the RAISE application by using an AR development environment and to integrate open source libraries for mapping data, camera posing, geostorage, and video display.
  • To enable multicasting, improved latency and faster service deployment by the use of edge capacity and smart flexible routing.
  • To experiment with the developed RAISE tools and application and to evaluate the real-time RAISE AR system.

Blog by Ioannis Giannoulakis, 8bells LTD

For more information about RAISE experiment, check also here.