Interactive planning of GNSS monitoring applications with virtual reality

In conventional GNSS planning software, the local circumstances at the antenna locations are hardly covered. Due to uniform cut-off angles in the elevation of the satellite orbits, the quality investigations are often not representative at inhomogeneous areas (e.g. vicinity of mountains or buildings). An experimental software was developed in Unity with ray-tracing approaches to evaluate the satellite constellation on the basis of actual on-site geometry with virtual reality. The software has been tested in a real-life use case for the simulation of GNSS measurements at an Austrian water dam. Furthermore, the results have been validated by actual GNSS measurements on-site.