ARRay-Tracing - A Middleware to Provide Ray Tracing Capabilities to Augmented Reality Libraries

PubDate: November 2020

Teams: Federal University of Juiz de Fora

Writers: Lidiane T. Pereira; Wellingston Cataldo R. Junior; Jairo F. Souza; Rodrigo L. S. Silva

PDF: ARRay-Tracing - A Middleware to Provide Ray Tracing Capabilities to Augmented Reality Libraries

Abstract

In recent years we saw the increase and popularization of Augmented Reality applications. However, the visual mismatch between real and virtual elements produce the absence of realism, discouraging the use of these applications. Rendering techniques, as Ray Tracing, can produce very photorealistic scenes. Despite its high computational cost, recent advances in graphics hardware allow the use of these techniques in real-time applications, like those of Augmented Reality. In the literature, we can find some works combining these two technologies, AR and Ray Tracing, but rigidly, without modularization, making the solutions dependent on certain frameworks. In this work, we propose a middleware to integrate Augmented Reality and Ray Tracing in a modularized way, allowing the developer to switch between existing libraries and frameworks to better fulfill their needs and expertise. To evaluate the proposal, we build an application using the artoolkitX library and the Optix framework. Through our middleware, we verified that it was possible to integrate these tools in a simple way, maintaining performance and photorealism in our AR application.