Collaborative Research: NeTS: Medium: Toward Pervasive Outdoor Augmented Reality

Augmented Reality (AR) applications place virtual contents, such as markers, avatars, images or videos, in users’ views of their surroundings. Users of outdoor AR applications can use these while walking, riding a bike, or driving in a vehicle to, for example, navigate dense environments safely. Today’s AR frameworks lack comprehensive support for developing outdoor AR applications. This project will produce a suite of techniques that will enable advanced AR applications, especially those that permit multiple users to interact with virtual objects in the environment, and deliver continuously updated views in near real-time of moving objects in the environment. Every AR application involves three different entities: the environment, the user, and the virtual objects introduced by the AR application. The collaborative project, which brings together researchers from the University of Southern California and the University of Michigan, will systematically develop techniques to model the environment, determine human pose, and model virtual object interaction with the physical environment. It will explicitly focus on fast algorithms, resource-efficient realizations on mobile devices, and employ a judicious combination of latency hiding, offload, pre-computation and pre-fetch techniques to simplify the development of usable outdoor AR applications with rich functionality. Outdoor AR applications can potentially improve public safety, enhance education, promote public health outcomes, provide entertainment, and support business activity. In addition, this project will involve undergraduates in community-building, by developing outdoor AR applications to facilitate the work of local non-profits, and expose these undergraduates to research. Its collaboration with industry will result in the transfer of AR technology to improve vehicular safety. The project's products, including papers, data and software artifacts are available at https://nsl.usc.edu/projects/pervasive-outdoor-ar. This website shall be available for at least three years after the conclusion of the grant, but products such as published papers and software may be available in other repositories for longer. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.