Reusable Modular Software Interfaces for Outdoor Augmented Reality Applications in Engineering

An Augmented Reality (AR) application is essentially a platform that integrates the selected hardware components via their corresponding software interfaces. In the context of this research, a software interface is a piece of code implemented to establish communication channels between a hardware device and the AR application platform. The implementation of such an interface for each piece of hardware in an AR application requires a significant amount of time and coding effort. In all engineering and scientific applications of AR developed thus far, although they largely integrate and communicate with the same set of hardware components, the effort invested in implementing the required software interfaces has been repeatedly duplicated. The objective of the presented research has been to remedy this situation by designing and implementing an extensible software framework that allows application developers to communicate with typical AR hardware components. This paper describes the design of a software interface that enables generic communication with peripheral positioning and orientation devices that are typical components in all scientific and engineering AR applications.