AR-based visibility evaluation for preserving landscapes of historical buildings

Building tall structures behind an aesthetic and historical building tends to destroy the good landscape. To avoid such situations, public agencies must regulate height of buildings and other structures near the landscape target. In order to check the visibility of portions of high, future structures, in this research, a new method using Augmented Reality (AR) was proposed. In this method, a number of virtual rectangular objects with a scale are located on the grid of 3D geographical model. And then, the virtual rulers are shown in an overlapping manner with the actual landscape from multiple viewpoints using the AR technology. The user measures the maximum skyline-preserving height for each rectangular object at a grid point. Using the measured data, the government or public agencies can establish appropriate height regulations for all surrounding areas of the target structures. To verify the proposed method, a system was developed deploying AR Toolkit and was applied to a scenic building. The performance of the system was checked and then, the errors of the obtained data were evaluated. In conclusion, the proposed method was evaluated feasible and effective.