Birds vs. Fish: Visualizing Out-of-View Objects in Augmented Reality using 3D Minimaps

PubDate: January 2020

Teams: Technische Universität München

Writers: Felix Bork; Ulrich Eck; Nassir Navab

PDF: Birds vs. Fish: Visualizing Out-of-View Objects in Augmented Reality using 3D Minimaps

Abstract

Despite recent technological advanced in Augmented Reality (AR), the majority of state-of-the-art head-mounted displays (HMDs) still suffers from a limited field of view. Hence, there is a high probability that virtual objects are located outside of the user’s view. Several approaches to mitigate the problem of out-of-view objects have been proposed in the past by using visualization techniques to guide the user’s attention towards such objects. However, none of these techniques provides any context about the real environment. Current state-of-the-art HMDs are equipped with various sensors to create a 3D map of the environment. In this work, we leverage such 3D reconstructions and developed a set of different 3D minimap visualizations for conveying information about out-of-view objects in AR. We propose a novel kind of minimap using stereographic fisheye projection and compare it to more traditional, bird’s-eye view minimaps. Preliminary results show that our stereographic fisheye minimap offers a set of distinct advantages over bird’s-eye view minimaps that facilitate the localization of virtual objects in AR environments.