The Arcona team has added yet another high-level professional — computer vision specialist with robotics background, — and is now entering a new phase of the Arcona Core development, namely, the implementation of the technology called SLAM.

SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping) makes it possible for the machines to understand their surroundings through visual input and is widely used in robotics and self-driving vehicles, allowing the machines to localize and navigate in the unknown scenes and also simultaneously build 3D maps.

Here’s the illustration of the state of art visual SLAM systems.

There is a pretty detailed review on visual SLAM by PhD Candidate of Dept. of Mechanical and Automation Engineering of The Chinese University of Hong Kong Zheng Fan and we are glad to share it with you, if you are into learning more about the technology and perspective.

We consider the implementation of this technology — relatedly to the Arcona project and precisely in terms of recognition and position tracking to place AR objects — to be the most relevant and to make the user’s experience more realistic and interactive.

Proper SLAM usually requires special sensors, like in Google Tango project, but we bet on a huge experience of our developers team to implement this innovative technology in the urban environment and to make it available and usable from an average device.

3D mapping allows for not only geometrically correctly placing the objects, but also gives the opportunity to take into account the occlusions, to complete incomplete data, for instance — building constructions. This helps to interact with the environment fully, organically mixing real and virtual for true mixed reality experience.

The integration of SLAM together with GIS-data and city models allows this technology to be taken to a new level. It makes your smartphone really smart, just as human powered by eyesight and a city map.

In the near future we will publish the first demo of using this technology for the Arcona project, stay tuned and follow the Arcona’s Telegram!