VR for Situational Awareness in Real-Time Orchard Architecture Assessment

Teleoperation in agricultural environments requires enhanced situational awareness for effective architectural scouting and decision-making for orchard management applications. The dynamic complexity of orchard structures presents challenges for remote visualization during architectural scouting operations. This study presents an adaptive streaming and rendering pipeline for real-time point cloud visualization in Virtual Reality (VR) teleoperation systems. The proposed method integrates selective streaming that localizes teleoperators within live maps, an efficient point cloud parser for Unity Engine, and an adaptive Level-of-Detail rendering system utilizing dynamically scaled and smoothed polygons. The implementation incorporates pseudo-coloring through LiDAR reflectivity fields to enhance the distinction between materials and geometry. The pipeline was evaluated using datasets containing LiDAR point cloud scans of orchard environments captured during spring and summer seasons, with testing conducted on both standalone and PC-tethered VR configurations. Performance analysis demonstrated improvements of 10.2-19.4% in runtime performance compared to existing methods, with a framerate enhancement of up to 112% achieved through selectively streamed representations. Qualitative assessment confirms the method's capability to maintain visual continuity at close proximity while preserving the geometric features discernible for architectural scouting operations. The results establish the viability of VR-based teleoperation for precision agriculture applications, while demonstrating the critical relationship between Quality-of-Service parameters and operator Quality of Experience in remote environmental perception.