HYBRID MOBILE AUGMENTED REALITY: WEB-LIKE CONCEPTS APPLIED TO HIGH RESOLUTION 3D OVERLAYS

Abstract

Mobile Augmented Reality (MAR) aligns toward current technological advances with more intuitive interfaces, realistic graphic content and flexible development processes. The case of overlaying precise 3D representations exploits their high penetration to induct users to a world where data are perceived as real counterparts. The work presented in this paper integrates web-like concepts with hybrid mobile tools to visualize high-quality and complex 3D geometry on the real environment. The implementation involves two different operational mechanisms: anchors and location-sensitive tracking. Three scenarios, for indoors and outdoors are developed using open-source and with no limit on distribution SDKs, APIs and rendering engines. The JavaScript-driven prototype consolidates some of the overarching principles of AR, such as pose estimation, registration and 3D tracking to an interactive User Interface under the scene graph concept. The 3D overlays are shown to the end user i) on top of an image target ii) on real-world planar surfaces and iii) at predefined points of interest (POI). The evaluation in terms of performance, rendering efficacy and responsiveness is made through various testing strategies: system and trace logs, profiling and ‗end-to-end‖ tests. The final benchmarking elucidates the slow and computationally intensive procedures induced by the big data rendering and optimization patterns are proposed to mitigate the performance impact to the non-native technologies.