Golparvar-Fard earns second best paper award for MARS system

A paper by Mani Golparvar-Fard, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering (CEE), has won the Best Conference Paper Award from the 2013 American Society of Civil Engineers International Workshop on Computing in Civil Engineering in Los Angeles in the area of Data Sensing and Analysis.

Entitled, “High-precision and Infrastructure-Independent Mobile Augmented Reality System for Context-Aware Construction and Facility Management Applications,” the paper was co-authored by Golparvar-Fard and collaborators Professor Jules White and graduate research assistant Hyojoon Bae of Virginia Tech. It details the theoretical foundations of a high-precision 4-dimensional augmented reality (HD4AR) technology which is commercialized as Mobile Augmented Reality System (MARS) through a venture capital-funded start-up company, PAR Works Inc.

MARS enables users to acquire information about physical objects immediately simply by taking a picture of them with a mobile device, without the need for location tracking modules such as GPS or fiduciary markers such as QRCodes.

In the context of construction and operation of the built environment, MARS Superintendent and Facility Manager apps support real-time field reporting and inspection tasks by allowing field personnel to capture photos, localize and orient themselves in the 3-dimensional space purely based on the content of photos with millimeter-level accuracy. Users can automatically receive information such as project specification, daily progress reports, or other pertinent information from an underlying Building Information Model (BIM) through augmented reality image overlays. The method also allows requests for information to be issued on site, QA/QC tasks to be completed, or instructions to be provided to other field personnel all through the taking and annotating of photos on mobile devices.

This is the second "best paper" award for the research project that was previously recognized by the 12th International Conference on Construction Applications of Virtual Reality 2012 in Taipei, Taiwan last November. The commercialized technology has also received the 2013 Consumer Electronic Show Innovation Award and was a finalist for 2013 Technical Achievement and Accelerator awards at SXSW. 

As a graduate student at Illinois, Golparvar-Fard (PhD 2010, Civil and Environmental Engineering) developed a new modeling technique using common photos to visualize and automatically track construction progress in four dimensions, offering construction professionals a new, low-cost way to monitor projects. He joined the Illinois faculty in December 2012, after serving as an assistant professor in the Via Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Virginia Tech.

The fundamental research aspects of this technology are supported by the National Science Foundation.
_________________________

Contact: Mani Golparvar-Fard, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, 217/417-9552.

Writer: Celeste Arbogast Bragorgos, director of communications, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, 217/333-6955.

If you have any questions about the College of Engineering, or other story ideas, contact Rick Kubetz, editor, Engineering Communications Office, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 217/244-7716.