Abstract
Mobile location-based AR frameworks typically project information about real or virtual locations in the vicinity of the user. Those locations are treated indiscriminately, regardless of whether they are actually within the field of view (FoV) of the user or not. However, displaying occluded objects often misleads users’ perception thereby compromising the clarity and explicitness of AR applications. This paper introduces an efficient geometric technique aiming at assisting developers of outdoors mobile AR applications in generating a realistic FoV for the users. Our technique enables real time building recognition in order to address the occlusion of physical or virtual objects by physical artifacts. Our method is demonstrated in the location-based AR game Order Elimination. The latter utilizes publicly available building information to calculate the players’ FoV in real-time. Extensive performance tests provide sufficient evidence that real-time FoV rendering is feasible by modest mobile devices, even under stress operation conditions. A user evaluation study reveals that the consideration of buildings for determining FoV in mobile AR games can increase the quality of experience perceived by players when compared with standard FoV generation methods.
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Notes
- 1.
The term ‘first-person shooter’ refers to a video game genre centered on gun and projectile weapon-based combat through a first-person perspective; that is, the player experiences the action through the eyes of the protagonist.
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- 5.
A commercial version of Order Elimination is available in Google Play (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=bl.on.mi.en).
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The OSM Overpass API provides textual description of buildings in a certain area, essentially a list of polygons, each comprising a series of latitude/longitude points.
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- 9.
Bearing refers to the angle of a moving object’s direction from the North.
- 10.
As reported in the TimeWarp evaluation results, the virtual artifacts in AR games should be preferably hidden when the player has no LoS with them. Even though we could effortlessly hide the AR content when eye contact with the Zombie was infeasible, we chose not to for game design purposes.
- 11.
Vuzix M100 Smart Glasses (https://www.vuzix.com/Products/M100-Smart-Glasses) supports a FoV angle of 15°, while Epson Moverio BT-200 (http://global.epson.com/newsroom/2014/news_20140107.html) supports 28°. Both products fully support smartphone integration.
- 12.
The Android Augment Reality Framework (https://github.com/phishman3579/android-augment-reality-framework) and Mixare (http://www.mixare.org/) support a FoV angle of 45°.
- 13.
The intuition for choosing the 5° angle has been, firstly, to create a sufficient FoV polygon for the Zombie to be included in and, secondly, to allow sufficiently wide FoV (than that of a single ray) so as to compensate for GPS location fix inaccuracies, which do not allow precise positioning calculations as in computer games.
- 14.
The participants have been recruited through an open invitation advertised in the University of the Aegean, Mytilene, Greece. Ten (10) of the participants have been male and two (2) female. Six (6) participants have been in the age group of 19–23, four (4) in the age group of 24–33 and two (2) in the age group 34–39.
- 15.
A video of the application can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D–A3fEghbA. The Android Application File (APK) can be downloaded at http://zarcrash.x10.mx/OrderEliminationc.apk.
- 16.
The questionnaire can be found at http://zarcrash.x10.mx/OrderEliminationGoogleForm.pdf.
- 17.
The application distributed to participants has been configured with the ray length set to 100 m, the FoV angle set to 28° and a game space of 250,000 m2 (square with side length of 500 m) while the mobile devices used by players varied in technical specifications (Sony Xperia S, Samsung (Galaxy S4 Mini, Beam, Note 4, S4), Nexus (4 & 6), F&U Tablet and Motorola Moto G 2nd Generation).
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Acknowledgement
This work has been supported by the CIP-ICT-PSP-2013-2017 Programme under grant agreement no. 621133 (HoPE - “Holistic Personal public Eco-mobility”).
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Kasapakis, V., Gavalas, D., Galatis, P. (2016). An Efficient Geometric Approach for Occlusion Handling in Outdoors Augmented Reality Applications. In: De Paolis, L., Mongelli, A. (eds) Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, and Computer Graphics. AVR 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9768. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40621-3_30
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