Augmented reality (AR) provides ways to visualize missing view samples for novel view synthesis. Existing approaches present 3D annotations for new view samples and task users with taking images by aligning the AR display. This data collection task is known to be mentally demanding and limits capture areas to pre-defined small areas due to the ideal but restrictive underlying sampling theory. To free users from 3D annotations and limited scene exploration, we propose using locally reconstructed light fields and visualizing errors to be removed by inserting new views. Our results show that the error-peaking visualization is less invasive, reduces disappointment in final results, and is satisfactory with fewer view samples in our mobile view synthesis system. We also show that our approach can contribute to recent radiance field reconstruction for larger scenes, such as 3D Gaussian splatting.

Novel view synthesis from images, for example, with 3D Gaussian splatting, has made great progress. Rendering fidelity and speed are now ready even for demanding virtual reality applications. However, the problem of assisting humans in collecting the input images for these rendering algorithms has received much less attention. High-quality view synthesis requires uniform and dense view sampling. Unfortunately, these requirements are not easily addressed by human camera operators, who are in a hurry, impatient, or lack understanding of the scene structure and the photographic process. Existing approaches to guide humans during image acquisition concentrate on single objects or neglect view-dependent material characteristics. We propose a novel situated visualization technique for scanning at multiple scales. During the scanning of a scene, our method identifies important objects that need extended image coverage to properly represent view-dependent appearance. To this end, we leverage semantic segmentation and category identification, ranked by a vision-language model. Spherical proxies are generated around highly ranked objects to guide the user during scanning. Our results show superior performance in real scenes compared to conventional view sampling strategies.