Augmented Reality for Art, Design and Cultural Heritage—System Design and Evaluation

Abstract

This paper describes the design of an optical see-through head-mounted display (HMD) system for Augmented Reality (AR). Our goals were to make virtual objects "perfectly" indistinguishable from real objects, wherever the user roams, and to find out to which extent imperfections are hindering applications in art and design. For AR, fast and accurate measuring of head motions is crucial. We made a head-pose tracker for the HMD that uses error-state Kalman filters to fuse data from an inertia tracker with data from a camera that tracks visual markers. This makes on-line head-pose based rendering of dynamic virtual content possible. We measured our system, and found that with an A4-sized marker viewed from > 20 • at 5 m distance with an SXGA camera (FOV 108 • ), the RMS error in the tracker angle was < 0.5 • when moving the head slowly. Our Kalman filters suppressed the pose error due to camera delay, which is proportional to the angular and linear velocities, and the dynamic misalignment was comparable to the static misalignment. Applications of artists and designers lead to observations on the profitable use of our AR system. Their exhibitions at world-class museums showed that AR is a powerful tool for disclosing cultural heritage.

Using Augmented Reality in early art education: a case study in Hong Kong kindergarten

“…Augmented Reality (AR) is one of the emerging technologies that may have the potential to bring about pedagogical innovations within this decade (New Media Consortium, 2010, 2011, 2012. AR could produce a direct vision of a physical environment from the real objects or real world combined with virtual elements at real time (Azuma, 1997).…”

Cultural Heritage in Marker-Less Augmented Reality: A Survey

“…The measurement of accuracy depends on the triangle base relative to its height. Sensors based on the principle of flight time measured the delay between emitting and detecting reflected light on the surface, thus, accuracy does not quickly deteriorate as the range increases [44]. Time-of-flight sensors have the possibility to provide measurements in the kilometre range.…”

ARCube—The Augmented Reality Cube for Archaeology

“…; Caarls et al . ; Noh et al . ; Garagnani and Manferdini ); however, the use of AR for research applications is limited to a few examples (http://www.ucl.ac.uk/museums/petrie/research/research-projects/3dpetrie), because AR is often considered insufficient for scientific use in the visualization of scaled, detailed and metrically correct objects.…”