Impact of Augmented Reality (AR) in Civil Engineering

The ability to view constructions virtually before using the real resources to construct them has been of main interest in civil engineering over a long period of time. This has been achieved partially through virtual reality. Virtual Reality helps in visualizing the operations on computer generated jobsites and to study the available alternate plans. Even though the latest software in virtual reality helps us in designing and drawing the plans, the question of reality still arises. The plans that are done in computer sometimes do not match with the real practical applications. This shows that it is difficult to bring the experiences of practical world into the computer. In order to overcome the gap between the real and virtual environments, this paper highlights the use of Augmented Reality (AR) in all the areas of civil engineering instead of using Virtual Reality. This paper describes the developing augmented reality technology and its various application domains in civil engineering.