SIGGRAPH 2018 – Virtual, Augmented and Mixed Reality

Experience the Future

As virtual reality (VR) expands into the consumer market, and augmented reality (AR) and mixed reality (MR) get ready for prime time, SIGGRAPH 2018 will be the place to take a deep dive into these emerging media. In 2018, we are featuring a new space: the Immersive Pavilion, which will be devoted exclusively to these mediums.

The Immersive Pavilion is the place to experience, play, and learn about the latest technological advances. It will host physical spaces to learn about the advancements in immersive realities such as the Vrcade (games and experiences), the VR Theater (storytelling) and the Village (installations).

https://s2018.siggraph.org/conference/conference-overview/virtual-augmented-mixed-reality/

AR App using registration technologies

With the availability of the AR registration technologies in the leading mobile platforms, the implementation of an own AR registration implementation lost its attractiveness. The idea is to implement an App to demonstrate and discover the potential and problems of applying this technology.

There is a lot of potential in applying the AR world map recovery, which all goes in the direction of the hyped AR cloud. Plenty of indoor use cases can be imagined, especially in the public domain.

In a public building, like a school or in a railway station, the ability to share AR experiences has a huge potential. Use cases include:

  • Navigation
  • Explanations
  • Application instructions
  • Time tables
  • Meeting points
  • Point of interest
  • Content generation/community
  • Information about objects
  • Sharing of information
  • Explanations with dynamic depth (first level information, with more in depth information on demand)
  • Evacuation

The application should provide ways to load a AR experience for a certain location, either automatic or over user selection. The loaded AR experience should be consumable, editable and enhanceable. This means:

  • You can navigate the environment getting augmented information about objects and locations
  • You can post information on a table or any other real world object
  • You can add information to already existing information

The AR experience should be shared ideally in real time.

World map registration

Experimenting with world map registration on iOS 12 beta showed encouraging results.

I experimented with adapting the ARchi VR application, https://archi.metason.net. The world map registration part has been implemented in a separate iOS Framework, which was linked into the App.

In a registration view, the user is able to rotate the recorded walls, move all walls and edit individual points.

When loading a world map, during re-localisation, a screen shot is shown to the user to help find the right spot for ARKit to reload the scene.

After successful re-localisation, multiple tools are available to manually adapt the scene, to adde elements and to save the data and the world map.

Code available in ZHAW github (protected): https://github.engineering.zhaw.ch/u39575/ARchiVR.