Abstract

Realistic interactions with real objects (e.g., animals, toys, robots) in an augmented reality (AR) environment enhances the user experience. The common AR apps on the market achieve realistic interactions by superimposing pre-modeled virtual proxies on the real objects in the AR environment. This way user perceives the interaction with virtual proxies as interaction with real objects. However, catering to environment change, shape deformation, and view update is not a trivial task. Our proposed method uses the dynamic silhouette of a real object to enable realistic interactions. Our approach is practical, lightweight, and requires no additional hardware besides the device camera. For a case study, we designed a mobile AR application to interact with real animal dolls. Our scenario included a virtual human performing four types of realistic interactions. Results demonstrated our method’s stability that does not require pre-modeled virtual proxies in case of shape deformation and view update. We also conducted a pilot study using our approach and reported significant improvements in user perception of spatial awareness and presence for realistic interactions with a virtual human.

Highlights

  • Published: 19 March 2021Unlike virtual reality (VR) which immerses users into a virtual environment, augmented reality (AR) allows users to see a mixed environment where virtual objects are superimposed on the real views [1]

  • All aspects have been slightly improved under the bounding box (BB)’s condition, participants reported that they felt awkward due to the poor occlusion in the following comments: P11: “BB looks like a person passing behind a square because the doll is cut less, but this can be seen as an error.”

  • We proposed the silhouette mesh, a practical method that allows virtual objects to perform realistic interactions with real objects without pre-modeled virtual proxies

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Summary

Introduction

Published: 19 March 2021Unlike virtual reality (VR) which immerses users into a virtual environment, augmented reality (AR) allows users to see a mixed environment where virtual objects are superimposed on the real views [1]. Since users can see the real environment (see Figure 1a), AR systems often require an accurate registration of virtual objects to provide seamless interactions in various situations [2,3]. Commercial apps in the entertainment industry usually use a pre-modeled real object as a virtual proxy [11,12,13]. To accurately place the virtual proxy in the 3D space, AR apps place a marker for reference [17,18] These markers help the AR Apps deploying proxies and coordinate (i.e., overlay) them with real objects [21]. After deployment, these proxies are rendered transparently in AR views to prevent users from being aware of proxies. Virtual humans interact with these invisible virtual proxies, but users perceive that the virtual human is interacting with real objects [6]

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