OGC announces the creation of new GeoPose Standards Working Group

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) announces the formation of the GeoPose Standards Working Group (SWG). Participants in this new OGC SWG will focus on developing a standard for geographically-anchored poses (aka GeoPoses) with six degrees of freedom referenced to one or more standardized Coordinate Reference Systems.

The combination of position (x, y, z or longitude, latitude, elevation) and orientation (pitch, roll, and yaw) with 6 degrees of freedom for objects in computer graphics and robotics is usually referred to as the object’s “pose.” Pose can be expressed as being in relation to other objects and/or to the user. When a pose is defined relative to a geographical frame of reference or coordinate system, it will be called a geographically anchored pose, or ‘GeoPose’ for short.

An object with a GeoPose may be any real physical object. This includes objects such as AR display devices (proxy for a user’s eyes), vehicles, robots, or even a park bench. It may also be a digital object like a BIM model, a computer game asset, the origin and orientation of the local coordinate system of an AR device, or a point-cloud dataset.

All physical world objects inherently have a geographically-anchored pose. Unfortunately, there is not a standard for universally expressing the pose in a manner that can be interpreted and used across the range of modern computing platforms.

The ability to specify the GeoPose of any object will aid in interoperability between real world 3D spatial computing systems, such as those under development for autonomous vehicles, augmented reality (AR), 3D map visualization, or any digital representation of the physical world or part therein (e.g., digital twins).

Members of the GeoPose SWG will work towards defining an interoperable way to express, record, transform, and share the GeoPose of objects in a consistent manner across different applications, users, devices, services, and platforms.