In this proposal we show case two 3D reconstruction systems running in real-time on a tablet equipped with a depth sensor. We believe that the proposed set of demonstrations will engage ISMAR attendees both in terms of tracking technology and user experience. Both demos show state-of-the art 3D reconstruction technology and give attendees a chance to try hands-on our tracking with simple and interactive user interfaces.

In this proposal we suggest a set of demonstrations to be presented at ISMAR 2014 around the topic of monocular tracking, mapping and rendering on mobile phones. We believe that the proposed set of demonstrations will engage ISMAR attendees both in terms of tracking technology and user experience. On the one hand, all demos show state-of-the art tracking and mapping technology and gives attendees a chance to try hands-on our tracking solutions and to discuss them with our researchers and developers. All demos also showcase compelling use cases enabled by our technology, encouraging discussions on topics such as integration of tracking technology with game engines and user experience research.

In augmented reality, it is often necessary to draw the user's attention to particular objects in the real world without distracting her from her task. We explore the effectiveness of directing a user's attention by imperceptibly modifying existing features of a video. We present three user studies of the effects of applying a saliency modulation technique to video; evaluating modulation awareness, attention, and memory. Our results validate the saliency modulation technique as an alternative means to convey information to the user, suggesting attention shifts and influencing recall of selected regions without perceptible changes to visual input.

In augmented reality displays, X-Ray visualization techniques make hidden objects visible through combining the physical view with an artificial rendering of the hidden information. An important step in X-Ray visualization is to decide which parts of the physical scene should be kept and which should be replaced by overlays. The combination should provide users with essential perceptual cues to understand the relationship of depth between hidden information and the physical scene. In this paper we present an approach that addresses this decision in unknown environments by analyzing camera images of the physical scene and using the extracted information for occlusion management. Pixels are grouped into perceptually coherent image regions and a set of parameters is determined for each region. The parameters change the X-Ray visualization for either preserving existing structures or generating synthetic structures. Finally, users can customize the overall opacity of foreground regions to adapt the visualization.

Figure 1: Example of our technique. Notice how there is enough information of the occluder preserved even though it has little initial structure. Furthermore, the preserved information helps conveying spatial arrangements between virtual and real objects. When simulating ”X-ray vision ” in Augmented Reality, a critical aspect is ensuring correct perception of the occluded objects posi-tion. Naı̈ve overlay rendering of occluded objects on top of real-world occluders can lead to a misunderstanding of the visual scene and a poor perception of the depth. We present a simple technique to enhance the perception of the spatial arrangements in the scene. An importance mask associated with occluders informs the render-ing what information can be overlaid and what should be preserved. This technique is independent of scene properties such as illumina-tion and surface properties, which may be unknown. The proposed solution is computed efficiently in a single-pass fragment shaders on the GPU.

This article presents interactive visualizations to support the comprehension of spatial relationships between virtual and real world objects for Augmented Reality (AR) applications. To enhance the clarity of such relationships we discuss visualization techniques and their suitability for AR. We apply them on different AR applications with different goals, e.g. in X-Ray vision or in applications which draw a user's attention to an object of interest. We demonstrate how Focus and Context (F+C) visualizations are used to affect the user's perception of hidden or nearby objects by presenting contextual information in the area of augmentation. We discuss the organization and the possible sources of data for visualizations in Augmented Reality and present cascaded and multi level F+C visualizations to address complex, cluttered scenes that are inevitable in real environments. This article also shows filters and tools to interactively control the amount of augmentation. It compares the impact of real world context preserving to a pure virtual and uniform enhancement of these structures for augmentations of real world imagery. Finally this paper discusses the stylization of sparse object representations for AR to improve X-Ray vision.

Field workers of utility companies are regularly engaged in outdoor tasks such as network planning and inspection of underground infrastructure. Redlining is the term used for manually annotating either printed paper maps or a 2D geographic information system on a notebook computer taken to the field. Either of these approaches requires finding the physical location to be annotated on the physical or digital map. In this paper, we describe a mobile Augmented Reality (AR) system capable of supporting virtual redlining. The AR visualization delivered by the system is constructed from data directly extracted from a GIS used in day-to-day production by utility companies. We also report on encouraging trials and interviews performed with professional field workers from the utility sector.

In this article we present interactive focus and context (F+C) visualizations for augmented reality (AR) applications. We demonstrate how F+C visualizations are used to affect the user's perception of hidden objects by presenting contextual information in the area of augmentation. We carefully overlay synthetic data on top of the real world imagery by taking into account the information that is about to be occluded. Furthermore, we present operations to control the amount of augmented information. Additionally, we developed an interaction tool, based on the magic lens technique, which allows for interactive separation of focus from context. We integrated our work into a rendering framework developed on top of the Studierstube augmented reality system. We finally show examples to demonstrate how our work benefits AR.

Augmented reality (AR) enables users to visualize synthetic information overlaid on top of real imagery. Such visualization may be achieved by tools that distort, filter or enhance the explored information. However, little to no work has focused on the separation of style definitions and their mapping to scene objects. We target this separation based on a context rich scenegraph. Our research allows the definition of visualization styles independent on the data to be visualized.

In this article we present an interaction tool, based on the Magic Lenses technique, that allows a 3D scene to be affected dynamically given contextual information, for example, to support information filtering. We show how elements of a scene graph are grouped by context in addition to hierarchically, and, how this enables us to locally modify their rendering styles. This research has two major contributions, the use of context sensitivity with 3D Magic Lenses in a scene graph and the implementation of multiple volumetric 3D Magic Lenses for Augmented Reality setups. We have developed our tool for the Studierstube framework which allows us doing rapid prototyping of Virtual and Augmented Reality applications. Some application directions are shown throughout the paper. We compare our work with other methods, highlight strengths and weaknesses and finally discuss research directions for our work.