Dragon's Path: Synthesizing User-Centered Flying Creature Animation Paths for Outdoor Augmented Reality Experiences

Advances in augmented reality promise to deliver highly immersive storytelling experiences by animating virtual characters naturally in the real world. However, creating such realistic animated content for viewing in augmented reality is non-trivial and challenging. In this paper, we present a novel approach to automatically generate user-centered flying creature animation paths for outdoor augmented reality experiences. Given a sequence of storyline actions, our approach finds suitable locations for the character to perform its actions via a location compatibility predictor trained with user preferences, synthesizing a corresponding animation path optimized with respect to the user’s perspective. We applied our approach to synthesize user-centered augmented reality experiences based on different storyline actions and environments. We also conducted user study experiments to validate the efficacy of our approach for synthesizing desirable augmented reality experiences.