Natural Physical Interaction Between Real and Virtual Objects in Augmented Reality Systems

In this paper, we present an method for implementing natural, real object-like physical interaction between real world objects and augmented virtual objects in Augmented Reality (AR) systems. First, we implemented physical interaction between virtual objects and the surrounding real world environment, which most AR contents lack, by reconstructing the detailed geometry of real world scenes. Second, we simulated collision response between pairs of colliding real and virtual objects using the corresponding premeasured coefficient of restitution (COR) to consider the differences of COR between different collision pairs. In addition, occlusion and shadowing between real and virtual objects was also implemented to prevent the other interactions from looking unnatural. User evaluation results show that our method was able to reproduce interaction between real and virtual objects which test subjects felt was natural for virtual objects representing real objects which has a wide-varying COR value against each collision

Semantic Augmented Reality Environment with Material-Aware Physical Interactions

© 2017 IEEE. In Augmented Reality (AR) environment, realistic interactions between the virtual and real objects play a crucial role in user experience. Much of recent advances in AR has been largely focused on developing geometry-aware environment, but little has been done in dealing with interactions at the semantic level. High-level scene understanding and semantic descriptions in AR would allow effective design of complex applications and enhanced user experience. In this paper, we present a novel approach and a prototype system that enables the deeper understanding of semantic properties of the real world environment, so that realistic physical interactions between the real and the virtual objects can be generated. A material-aware AR environment has been created based on the deep material learning using a fully convolutional network (FCN). The state-of-the-art dense Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping (SLAM) has been used for the semantic mapping. Together with efficient accelerated 3D ray casting, natural and realistic physical interactions are generated for interactive AR games. Our approach has significant impact on the future development of advanced AR systems and applications

Here To Stay: A Quantitative Comparison of Virtual Object Stability in Markerless Mobile AR

Mobile augmented reality (AR) has the potential to enable immersive, natural interactions between humans and cyber-physical systems. In particular markerless AR, by not relying on fiducial markers or predefined images, provides great convenience and flexibility for users. However, unwanted virtual object movement frequently occurs in markerless smartphone AR due to inaccurate scene understanding, and resulting errors in device pose tracking. We examine the factors which may affect virtual object stability, design experiments to measure it, and conduct systematic quantitative characterizations across six different user actions and five different smartphone configurations. Our study demonstrates noticeable instances of spatial instability in virtual objects in all but the simplest settings (with position errors of greater than 10cm even on the best-performing smartphones), and underscores the need for further enhancements to pose tracking algorithms for smartphone-based markerless AR.Peer reviewe

Using Augmented Reality as a Medium to Assist Teaching in Higher Education

In this paper we describe the use of a high-level augmented reality (AR) interface for the construction of collaborative educational applications that can be used in practice to enhance current teaching methods. A combination of multimedia information including spatial three-dimensional models, images, textual information, video, animations and sound, can be superimposed in a student-friendly manner into the learning environment. In several case studies different learning scenarios have been carefully designed based on human-computer interaction principles so that meaningful virtual information is presented in an interactive and compelling way. Collaboration between the participants is achieved through use of a tangible AR interface that uses marker cards as well as an immersive AR environment which is based on software user interfaces (UIs) and hardware devices. The interactive AR interface has been piloted in the classroom at two UK universities in departments of Informatics and Information Science