AUGMENTED REALITY
Augmented Reality (AR) is the synthesis of real and virtual imagery[6]. In contrast to Virtual Reality (VR) in which the user is immersed in an entirely artificial world, augmented reality overlays extra information on real scenes: typically computer generated graphics are overlaid into the user’s field-of-view to provide extra information about their surroundings, or to provide visual guidance for the completion of a task. In its simplest form, augmented reality could overlay simple highlights, arrows or text labels into the user’s view - for example, arrows might guide the user around a foreign city. More complex applications might display intricate 3D models, rendered in such a way that they appear indistinguishable from the surrounding natural scene.
Major advantages of AR are ease of collaboration, intuitive interaction, integration of digital information, and mobile computing. AR enables a user to work in a real world environment. At the same time user can receive additional computer-generated information. Until recently, AR has been mainly engaged in scientific visualization and gaming environments, but the latest investigations are aimed at supporting activities like surgery, training and collaborative work[7]. Some early uses of AR in architecture were for sketching.
Fig.4. Pipeline of AR system
Figure 4 illustrates the pipeline of AR system[8]: the user points image capturing device to a marker; the image is captured and converted to black-and-white format; the marker is located in the image and coordinate system is computed based on position and orientation of marker; using computed coordinate system, an image of 3D object is rendered; the resulting image is overlaid on device display. The process is near real-time, depending on hardware capabilities of the system.
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