Lighting understanding plays an important role in virtual object composition, including mobile augmented reality (AR) applications. Prior work often targets recovering lighting from the physical environment to support photorealistic AR rendering. Because the common workflow is to use a back-facing camera to capture the physical world for overlaying virtual objects, we refer to this usage pattern as back-facing AR. However, existing methods often fall short in supporting emerging front-facing mobile AR applications, e.g., virtual try-on where a user leverages a front-facing camera to explore the effect of various products (e.g., glasses or hats) of different styles. This lack of support can be attributed to the unique challenges of obtaining 360° HDR environment maps, an ideal format of lighting representation, from the front-facing camera and existing techniques. In this paper, we propose to leverage dual-camera streaming to generate a high-quality environment map by combining multi-view lighting reconstruction and parametric directional lighting estimation. Our preliminary results show improved rendering quality using a dual-camera setup for front-facing AR compared to a commercial solution.
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Analysis of Peripheral Vision and Vibrotactile Feedback During Proximal Search Tasks with Dynamic Virtual Entities in Augmented Reality
Virtual content into a real environment. There are many factors that can affect the perceived physicality and co-presence of virtual entities, including the hardware capabilities, the fidelity of the virtual behaviors, and sensory feedback associated with the interactions. In this paper, we present a study investigating participants’ perceptions and behaviors during a time-limited search task in close proximity with virtual entities in AR. In particular, we analyze the effects of (i) visual conflicts in the periphery of an optical see-through head-mounted display, a Microsoft HoloLens, (ii) overall lighting in the physical environment, and (iii) multimodal feedback based on vibrotactile transducers mounted on a physical platform. Our results show significant benefits of vibrotactile feedback and reduced peripheral lighting for spatial and social presence, and engagement. We discuss implications of these effects for AR applications.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1852002
- PAR ID:
- 10147588
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- ACM Symposium on Spatial User Interaction
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 9
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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null (Ed.)Due to the additive light model employed by most optical see-through head-mounted displays (OST-HMDs), they provide the best augmented reality (AR) views in dark environments, where the added AR light does not have to compete against existing real-world lighting. AR imagery displayed on such devices loses a significant amount of contrast in well-lit environments such as outdoors in direct sunlight. To compensate for this, OST-HMDs often use a tinted visor to reduce the amount of environment light that reaches the user’s eyes, which in turn results in a loss of contrast in the user’s physical environment. While these effects are well known and grounded in existing literature, formal measurements of the illuminance and contrast of modern OST-HMDs are currently missing. In this paper, we provide illuminance measurements for both the Microsoft HoloLens 1 and its successor the HoloLens 2 under varying environment lighting conditions ranging from 0 to 20,000 lux. We evaluate how environment lighting impacts the user by calculating contrast ratios between rendered black (transparent) and white imagery displayed under these conditions, and evaluate how the intensity of environment lighting is impacted by donning and using the HMD. Our results indicate the further need for refinement in the design of future OST-HMDs to optimize contrast in environments with illuminance values greater than or equal to those found in indoor working environments.more » « less
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Display technologies in the fields of virtual and augmented reality affect the appearance of human representations, such as avatars used in telepresence or entertainment applications, based on the user’s current viewing conditions. With changing viewing conditions, it is possible that the perceived appearance of one’s avatar changes in an unexpected or undesired manner, which may change user behavior towards these avatars and cause frustration in using the AR display. In this paper, we describe a user study (N=20) where participants saw themselves in a mirror standing next to their own avatar through use of a HoloLens 2 optical see-through head-mounted display. Participants were tasked to match their avatar’s appearance to their own under two environment lighting conditions (200 lux and 2,000 lux). Our results showed that the intensity of environment lighting had a significant effect on participants selected skin colors for their avatars, where participants with dark skin colors tended to make their avatar’s skin color lighter, nearly to the level of participants with light skin color. Further, in particular female participants made their avatar’s hair color darker for the lighter environment lighting condition. We discuss our results with a view on technological limitations and effects on the diversity of avatar representations on optical see-through displays.more » « less
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3357251.3357585
