Demand is growing for markerless augmented reality (AR) experiences, but designers of the real-world spaces that host them still have to rely on inexact, qualitative guidelines on the visual environment to try and facilitate accurate pose tracking. Furthermore, the need for visual texture to support markerless AR is often at odds with human aesthetic preferences, and understanding how to balance these competing requirements is challenging due to the siloed nature of the relevant research areas. To address this, we present an integrated design methodology for AR spaces, that incorporates both tracking and human factors into the design process. On the tracking side, we develop the first VI-SLAM evaluation technique that combines the flexibility and control of virtual environments with real inertial data. We use it to perform systematic, quantitative experiments on the effect of visual texture on pose estimation accuracy; through 2000 trials in 20 environments, we reveal the impact of both texture complexity and edge strength. On the human side, we show how virtual reality (VR) can be used to evaluate user satisfaction with environments, and highlight how this can be tailored to AR research and use cases. Finally, we demonstrate our integrated design methodology with a case study on AR museum design, in which we conduct both VI-SLAM evaluations and a VR-based user study of four different museum environments.
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This content will become publicly available on October 6, 2024
Invisible Textures: Comparing Machine and Human Perception of Environment Texture for AR
Mobile augmented reality (AR) has a wide range of promising applications, but its efficacy is subject to the impact of environment texture on both machine and human perception. Performance of the machine perception algorithm underlying accurate positioning of virtual content, visual-inertial SLAM (VI-SLAM), is known to degrade in low-texture conditions, but there is a lack of data in realistic scenarios. We address this through extensive experiments using a game engine-based emulator, with 112 textures and over 5000 trials. Conversely, human task performance and response times in AR have been shown to increase in environments perceived as textured. We investigate and provide encouraging evidence for invisible textures, which result in good VI-SLAM performance with minimal impact on human perception of virtual content. This arises from fundamental differences between VI-SLAM-based machine perception, and human perception as described by the contrast sensitivity function. Our insights open up exciting possibilities for deploying ambient IoT devices that display invisible textures, as part of systems which automatically optimize AR environments.
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- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10490755
- Publisher / Repository:
- ACM
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proc. ACM ImmerCom
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 229 to 236
- Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
- ["Augmented reality","mixed reality","VI-SLAM","human perception","machine perception","texture"]
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- Madrid Spain
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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