Rather than looking at a map, what if you could experience a real-world environment in full 3-D? What if you could virtually manipulate a worksite, then immediately share plans in real time? The Team Awareness Kit (TAK) is an open-standards software platform used by 250,000 users across the world to communicate onsite and share environment information. The virtual reality version of TAK (VTAK) is being developed to take communication and data sharing to the next level: route planning will become more intuitive. Collaborating with onsite team members will become more immersive. Learn how this application, originally developed for the military, can be used for commercial and industrial use, for visualizing any large or small-scale environment, making decisions based on visualizations, and sharing this information with your team.

In this session, you’ll learn how you can use VTAK to collaborate on spatially accurate worksites with tens or hundreds of team members in real time. We’ll demonstrate a 3-D virtual environment based on a real-world, geo-registered location. We’ll demonstrate how to navigate using an Oculus Quest virtual reality headset, as well as a connected phone and tablet. You’ll learn how to navigate in the air or at ground level. You’ll experience placing and rotating vehicles and equipment, making notations, taking measurements, determining lines of sight, viewing images, and video feeds. Finally, you’ll be able to pinpoint locations of other team members, communicate between VR participants via text chat or audio, and send and receive marked-up plans while onsite or anywhere around the world.

Technologies/platforms/devices discussed:
Virtual reality application and collaboration between a VR headset, a tablet, and a phone, all connected through the Team Awareness Kit (TAK) network.