What happens when one of the fastest-growing cities in the country collaborates with one of the fastest-growing augmented reality visualization companies?

The Challenge

The city’s vast above and underground infrastructure of assets, including roadways, water, gas, and sewer systems, streetlights, lampposts, and the broadband network require active day-to-day maintenance and management. Unfortunately, managing those underground assets involves a lot of digging.

Brampton’s strategic approach

vGIS enables Brampton’s staff on the field to get an augmented view of world by visualizing Geographic Information System data (GIS). They combine their data with Peel Region’s (the regional municipality that includes Brampton, Mississauga, and Caledon) to deliver a robust, real-time digital model of their infrastructure assets, current and planned.

Data at your fingertips

With vGIS, a crew, tasked with repairing an asset such as a street light, was able to validate our GIS street light data and visualize the data spatially with the surrounding environment. The data could be validated using a City-issued phone or potentially using a HoloLens2 to see the location of unground street light infrastructure and the other underground assets through superimposed holographic imagery.

HoloLens 2 enables employees to remain hands-free as they work, increasing their productivity and providing a dramatically more intuitive user experience. Field personnel gain an augmented view that includes holographic infrastructure objects, improving their environmental assessments and increasing their situational awareness.

Faster and more accurate field work benefits everyone, including residents living with construction delays. From delivering real-time, in-field holographic visualizations of underground pipes, valves, cables, and other utility objects to visualizing ground-penetrating radar scans, vGIS estimates it saves 12 to 20 hours per person, per month.