Augmented Reality meets Earth Observation

ARmEO aims to narrow the current technological and cultural gap between farmers and Earth Observation (EO) services. This win-win connection would lead to increasing the efficiency of crop management, better controlling crop yields, reducing farmer’s economic risks and solving concerns over the environment while complying with policies. ARmEO will leverage synergies between the two main space technologies: EO (Copernicus) and navigation (EGNOS/Galileo). The developed Augmented Reality (AR) application will be based on signals and services from EGNOS and Galileo, while time series information from Sentinel-2 will provide the thematic inputs. The topic has a strong socio-political relevance for the European agricultural sector with its many small- to medium- sized farms as they will gain access to satellite-derived information to improve productivity and efficiency. Part of the results have a potential for application in the short term while the integration of EO and AR on the long run is seen as inevitable. In particular, all current technology roadmaps indicate that AR devices will enter the agricultural technology market in about 5-10 years on a broad scale. It is therefore mandatory that Austria remains a leader in this emerging field.