Abstract:
Mobile devices become more and more important today, especially for augmented
reality (AR) applications in which the camera of the mobile device acts like
a window into the mixed reality world. Up to now, no photorealistic
augmentation is possible since the computational power of the mobile devices
is still too weak. Even a streaming solution from a stationary PC would cause
a latency, that affects user interactions considerably. Therefore, we
introduce a differential illumination method that allows for a consistent
illumination of the inserted virtual objects on mobile devices, avoiding a
delay. The necessary computation effort is shared between a stationary PC and
the mobile devices to make use of the capacities available on both sides. The
method is designed such that only a minimum amount of data has to be
transferred asynchronously between the stationary PC and one or multiple
mobile devices. This allows for an interactive illumination of virtual
objects with a consistent appearance under both temporally and spatially
varying real illumination conditions. To describe the complex near-field
illumination in an indoor scenario, multiple HDR video cameras are used to
capture the illumination from multiple directions. In this way, sources of
illumination can be considered that are not directly visible to the mobile
device because of occlusions and the limited field of view of built-in
cameras.