The side road(s) of AR: Geospatial anchor precision for traffic signs

Current AR Geolocation technology is used to position anchors in the real-word from geo-coordinates. In this context, assessing the precision, stability, and usability of AR geolocation workflows becomes essential to determine their suitability for safety-critical environments such as road signage systems. We evaluate if the available tools can be used for real-world applications where AR augmented traffic signs will be a viable substitute for real installed on the side of the road ones. We set up a GNSS guided AR tool (ARCore Geospatial) in a modern high-end smartphone (Pixel 9) and perform 3 different kinds of accuracy tests on 2 different roads, representative of rural and urban use cases. All measurements are compared against a reference GNSS receiver (Stonex a900). Our results consistently show that AR positioned anchors can deviate on the order of meters from the target sign in latitude, longitude and altitude while also exhibiting poor stability and drifts as wide as road lanes in some cases.

Keywords: Augmented Reality, GNSS, Geospatial, Smartphone, ARCore, Positioning, Traffic signs, Outdoors, Road.