VR Traverse

Practise traverse surveying Anytime

VR Traverse is a full-featured immersive virtual surveying fieldwork tool developed by LSGI for students to practise traverse surveying. Using their own computer, students can complete traverse survey within the virtual 3D environment with great degree of freedom comparable to real-world surveying. Traversing is one of the major topics in surveying and practical is essential to learning surveying skills. It is difficult to learn surveying through reading without hands-on practical training. During the pandemic, when all face-to-face practicals were cancelled, VR Traverse was being deployed to over 200 students of different backgrounds as an assignment that contributed to 10% of their subject.

Great usability and user experience are of utmost importance for the success of the program, thus VR Traverse is developed with the end user in mind and with great attention to detail. To ensure great usability and experience, the program has a long list of features built-in to ease the learning curve while keeping realism high and hardware requirements low. To assess the practicability and effectiveness of using VR Traverse as fieldwork replacement, anonymous questionnaire surveys and interviews were conducted. From the positive results and feedback, VR Traverse is well received by the students and proven to be a viable solution for teaching and learning surveying.

VR Traverse is made possible by the Quality Incentive Scheme on Online Teaching Grant of The Hong Kong Polytechnic University.

Angle Measurement

Horizontal and vertical angle measurements are of high 1 second accuracy.

Distance Measurement

Slope distance measurement is of 1mm accuracy, with realistic light reflection effect and audio feedback.

Continuous Display

Angles and distance are displayed on the control panel continuously like a real total station.

Rough Positioning

A bright ring is provided for fast rough positioning of instrument setup.

Optical Plummet

Optical plummet can be used for precise centring of instruments.

Collision Detection

User will be warned when setting the instrument too close to wall or object.

Line of Sight

Line of sight can be easily checked with the semi-transparent instrument during the setup.

Face Left Face Right

Total station can switch between face left and face right for error cancellation.

Backsight and Foresight

Targets are clearly labelled for easy identification. They will point to the total station or user automatically.

Point Labelling

New points are marked and labelled sequentially, user can revisit them later if needed.

Virtual Environment

The virtual environment is a small enclosed area with buildings that look similar to those in PolyU.

Instructions and tips

Along with the map, instructions and tips are displayed on the wall near the starting position.

Reference Objects

RO1 & RO2 are located at the roof corner of different buildings that can be easily found.

Web Version

A fully functional web version that can run through a browser is available to Mac users.

Responsive Commands

Available commands are displayed on the lower left, they will change according to circumstances.

Optical Sight

Optical sight can be used for rough pointing to the target.

Adaptive Leg Extension

Tripod legs will extend to different lengths to cope with various terrain and instruments are auto-levelled.

Swap Function

Changing the total station to backsight and the foresight to total station can be done by one click.

Removal

Instruments and points can be removed and repositioned if their locations are undesirable.

Assignment Demonstration

Students are required to complete a closed traverse from Control Point 1 to Control Point 2 and establish 4 or more new control points in between of their own choice. They need to download and run the VR Traverse program on their own computer to complete the fieldwork. The program can run on Windows machines with minimal requirements, a web version that can run through a browser is provided for students who use Mac as their computer. Using the surveying equipment in the program, students can carry out traverse survey within the virtual environment that resembles a mini PolyU campus. Measurements are booked manually onto the field sheet like they would do on-site. After taking all the required measurements, they need to complete the computations and make necessary adjustments. In case the misclosure is greater than allowed, they need to redo the whole survey.

As traverse surveying is fairly complicated with many steps involved, a small mistake can lead to big error, a short demo video (shown above) was created for students to get familiarised with the program and the surveying procedures. Along with all the raw data and computations, students need to submit answers to the two open questions "Problems came across and solutions" and "What you have learnt from the VR practical?" as well. The answers to the second question are compiled as the User Reviews below.

User Reviews

Run VR Traverse

The program can be run on both chrome-based web browser and Windows PC.

HTML (web version) Windows (128MB)

Control station 1: 844981.503mN, 822942.903mE
Control station 2: 845005.975mN, 823059.510mE
RO1: 844983.095mN, 822903.666mE
RO2: 844955.959mN, 823026.286mE

Anonymous Survey

In addition to our own VR Traverse, we gave students a commercial VR package developed by South Surveying and Mapping Technology Co. Ltd. (South) to use during the semester. The South VR package covers different surveying topics other than traversing. We have conducted anonymous questionnaire surveys on both programs and asked the very same questions to compare their performance. In general, students welcome using VR programs as teaching and learning tool and they rated VR Traverse higher in all regards.

User Reviews

*The reviews above are excerpts compiled from the assignment question
"What you have learnt from the VR practical?"

As all practicals in semester 2 were cancelled, we offered make-up classes on total station operation and levelling during the summer. We took the opportunity to interview some students after they had their hands on real surveying equipment for the first time, asked them their experience on using VR Traverse.
*students were more at ease to express their opinions in cantonese,
english subtitles are available

“I quite recommend using VR to practise before doing any fieldwork. That will make the actual fieldwork much smoother.”

“using this app gives me a sense of familiarity, the virtual environment is our campus. Students can choose their own route freely, it has high degree of freedom”

“the app clearly displays the commands at the lower left, it shows you the next step after clicking different commands. It doesn't take much time to learn how to use.”

Team Members

Project Leader:
Dr. Lawrence LAU (LSGI)

Production:
Andy MACK (LSGI)

Scientific Advisor:
Stella TSE (LSGI)

Members:
Prof. Wu CHEN (LSGI),
Prof. Charles WONG (LSGI),
Dr. Wallace LAI (LSGI),
Roy KAM (EDC)