PROMAR: Practical Reference Object-based Multi-user Augmented Reality

Augmented reality (AR) is an emerging technology that weaves virtual objects into physical environments, and enables users to interact with them through viewing devices. This paper targets on multi-user AR applications, where virtual objects (VOs) placed by a user can be viewed by other users. We develop a practical framework that supports the basic multi-user AR functions of placing and viewing VOs, and our system can be deployed on off-the-shelf smartphones without special hardware. The main technical challenge we address is that when facing the exact same scene, the user who places the VO and the user who views the VO may have different view angles and distances to the scene. This setting is realistic and the traditional solutions yield a poor performance in terms of the accuracy. In this work, we have developed a suite of algorithms that help the viewers accurately identify the same scene and restore the VO under a moderate range of view angle difference. We have prototyped our system, and the experimental results have shown significant performance improvements. Our source codes and demos can be accessed at https://github.com/PROMAR2019.