AR4CUP 

Artefacto will be the SME leader of the project. It will also be the product owner and it will manage the marketing and communication strategy, so as to be ready to put it on the market by the end of the project. Artefacto will be responsible for the EIT digital sustainability strategy. The product will be available on the Internet as a software as a service and will be sold with a monthly fee. A part of the fee will be redistributed to EIT to ensure its sustainability. During the project, Artefacto will model andor optimize demonstration contents, in order to make them relevant throughout Europe (i.e. based on the PoliMi specifications). Artefacto will then develop a back-office and an augmented reality mobile application (iOS/Android) dedicated to collaborative urban planning with enjoying the suggestions and feedback of the end user/customer Covivio As regards to augmented reality, Artefacto will work closely with VTT to enable fully automatic and accurate mobile AR experience to the end users. Efficient localization, photorealistic visualization and handling of occlusions will be the main subjects that will be addressed by the partners. Finally, Artefacto will lead progress meetings, it will be responsible for the production of deliverables and the communication around the project.

VTT Technical Research of Finland Ltd. will be the augmented reality research partner in the project. Since over 15 years, VTT has implemented several world-first mobile AR solutions with main focus in AEC (Architecture, Engineering and Construction). VTT has conducted several customer paid AR projects in real city planning cases involving different stakeholders from decision makers to local citizens. VTT’s tracking technology, available as ALVAR computer vision SDK, specializes in fully automatic, efficient and accurate 3D point cloud based tracking. VTT’s AR applications also incorporate various methods for photorealistic visualization and handling of occlusions. In the AR4CUP project VTT’s computer vision and rendering technology is adopted and further enhanced by enabling tracking initialization and occlusions based on existing 3D city models and point clouds. VTT is leader of the AR technology task in the project, where it works in close co-operation with Artefacto to enable fully automatic and accurate mobile AR experience to the end users. During the project, the partners will release a dedicated scale 1:1 mobile augmented reality multiplatform library (iOS / Android / etc.) as new module in VTT’s ALVAR SDK.

PoliMi will be the Architecture and Urban Studies research partner in the project. It will provide the specifications of the default contents that will be relevant across Europe and that will be useful as demonstrators of the suitability of the service. PoliMi will also provide a comparative study of urban planning procedures for urban project approval in European countries aiming at supporting a proper and relevant product development. Concerning the involvement strategies, PoliMi will define and implement a strategy for stimulating the co-design processes using AR, in order to ensure that sufficient data is collected to enable efficient data analyses. As regards collaborative urban planning, PoliMi will define questionnaires to collect citizen reactions to urban design projects before construction. This task, focused on social inclusion and environmental sustainability will include: (i) relevant metrics for investigating the perceived urban design performance; (ii) the definition of a questionnaire for collecting users’ feedback; (iii) the methodology for data analysis. This stage is intended to anticipate the reactions to urban projects by informing the stakeholders involved in the process and, hence, to support the overall process improvement while reducing the risk of disagreement and process slowdown. Lastly, PoliMi will lead the final evaluations of the product and participate in meetings, production of deliverables and (scientific) communication of the project.