Land Parcels in Augmented Reality with the Regrid API

This week the Regrid team released major updates to our nationwide land parcel API. The API makes it easy to pull spatial records from our dataset of 152+ million land parcels, 183+ million building footprints, and 300+ million secondary addresses covering more than 99% of the US population. 

Earlier this year we approached Gravity Jack — a leading Augmented Reality studio — with a question:

“Would it be possible to use the Regrid API to visualize nationwide land parcel boundaries and information in Augmented Reality?”

The answer, we learned, is an emphatic yes. Here’s a video of the demo app we produced together, using the Regrid API to overlay property boundaries and information on the physical world:

(Note the music in this video is by Regrid’s CTO, Larry Sheradon, from his album, Sugar Pine.)

With this prototype, we didn’t set out to create a fully polished parcel AR product. Rather we wanted to learn how it works, prove the concept, and invite others to use the Regrid API in their own AR apps for visualization and/or geofencing.

Here’s a list of what we were able to demonstrate in a very short period of time:

We had a blast working on this with the Gravity Jack team, and they did, too. On using the Regrid API to develop the AR app, Gravity Jack’s Chief Strategy Officer, Jennifer Richey remarked:

Of course there are things we didn’t get to in this first technology preview that we’d like to see taken further:

The great news is that showing multiple boundaries through the API at the same time is not an issue, and the occlusion and precision placement challenges are being worked on by AR platforms and SDKs so they will be faster to implement. 

Land Parcels for AR Geofencing:

One of the things that stood out to us while making this is that parcel boundaries are a perfect dataset for geofencing certain kinds of AR content, even when there’s no need to visualize the lot lines in the app. 

Because the data contains information about exactly where a parcel begins and ends, and whether a parcel is public, private, residential, etc, app developers can choose to show or not show content in a location based on this information.

Parcels can solve the problem faced by some world-scale AR apps where public content is generated on someone’s house or private property. Not fun for the user, the homeowner, or the app developer who fields the complaints!

We plan to continue exploring AR and VR applications for land parcel data, and invite anyone making AR and VR apps who would like to evaluate the data for use in their apps to reach out to us at parcels@regrid.com.

Further Viewing & Reading:

Here’s a long-form conversation I had with Gravity Jack’s Chief Strategy Officer, Jennifer Richey, about her thoughts on the AR and VR space, the evolution of Gravity Jack, and this project that we worked on together:

Regrid’s nationwide coverage map with links to the data schema and documentation: regrid.com/store