Viaduct and Bridge Structural Analysis and Inspection through an App for Immersive Remote Learning

Until now, in the design phase of infrastructures there has been a general tendency to “economize” the resources allocated to them. This modus operandi did not consider the installation of monitoring and control systems as an integral part of the infrastructure itself, not considering the high post-intervention costs. This work aims to show how the integration of immersive technologies, including Virtual/Augmented/Mixed Reality, combined with geomatics, survey and structural monitoring techniques can ensure a better visualization and understanding of the different contexts in which the managing bodies are required to guarantee maintenance interventions. In particular, the potential of an application, developed by the authors in Unity 3D, to help the managing institution is described. The app permits the user to explore infrastructures under inspection in a virtual environment. This makes all the information related to the infrastructure available and accessible through the 3D analysis (which is manageable in the app after a mesh edge reduction phase) exploiting the full potential of Mixed/Virtual Reality. The main ability of our application derives from the chance to easily use and integrate different techniques (3D models, information models for construction, VR/AR) allowing for the choice of different 3D models testing and performing their simplification and dimensional reduction. This makes the loading phase of the application faster and the user experience easier and better. The experimentation of the proposed methodology was conducted on a viaduct located in Reggio Calabria.