Component based engineering of a mobile BIM-based augmented reality system

• AR can facilitate the process of mapping the design documentation to 3D real-world.
• Component based software development can be used to develop a BIM-based AR system.
• BIM with scheduling information can be successfully displayed in an AR environment.
• Developed BIM-based AR system has been tested on a real construction project.
• AR systems are faced with technical as well as usability challenges.

Over the last decade, building information models (BIM) have become increasingly popular. Yet their use on construction sites where the digital materializes, is limited. A technology that can bridge the gap between the digital and the real world is augmented reality (AR). We analyze this gap and the AR potential and present how the component based software engineering method can be used to efficiently implement a BIM-based AR system for construction. An architecture of the software system is proposed and verified by a prototype which was tested in a real construction project. We found out that the use of AR can significantly narrow the semantic gap between the digital model and the real world; that components for creating a BIM-based AR systems exist but currently do not scale well to large models; and that the use in AR applications creates additional requirements the for BIM models and tools, particularly related to the BIM's 4th dimension.