Common APIs for Tracking Libraries for Vision-based AR

Tracking and registering the position and orientation of the user’s camera in real-time is a fundamental functionality for Augmented Reality. For enterprise use cases, the environment cannot always have markers for tracking. There are vision-based tracking libraries using markers and natural feature recognition technologies available as open source libraries as well as under license from commercial sources. In the future, there will likely be many tracking libraries, each optimized for specific contexts and tasks.

When designing AR experiences, developers using existing AR authoring platforms are either forced to use the publisher’s own tracking library, or, under the best of circumstances, may choose tracking libraries which will be compiled into the final experience. The developer’s choice will depend on the use case requirements. However, when authoring AR experiences, the developer does not have full control or perfect knowledge (for training purposes) of all the environments and features that will be in the user camera’s field of view.

As AR experiences become more complex and suitable for use in more environments and circumstances, the AR developer may need to provide (to include or offer) multiple tracking libraries, each suited to the phase of a process or the setting of the user when performing tasks.

This research topic will explore requirements of AR experiences and the attributes of common and future tracking libraries for AR and, based on use cases and requirements, develop one or more application programming interfaces that can be implemented and submitted to an appropriate organization for standardization.

Stakeholders

Standards bodies, end users, AR experience developers, AR authoring platform publishers, AR tracking library developers, computer vision scientists and developers.

Possible Methodologies

The research will focus on tracking library characteristics and the authoring platforms. There will also need to be study of run-time systems for analyzing the real world features and matching the tracking library with the user contexts for the AR experiences to be provided. The research will also require working with open and consensus-based Standards Development processes.

Research Program

This research topic could be part of a program developing more “fine tuned” tracking libraries for specific enterprise workplaces, environments and tasks. The results would also benefit non-enterprise users who also change their needs and use cases without wanting to download new or update their AR experiences.

Miscellaneous Notes

API development for more flexible architectures when authoring with or using vision-based tracking libraries was proposed as an AREA-directed research project topic in January 2020.

Keywords

Application programming interface, APIs, Tracking Library, AR Experience Software, Interoperability, Multi-Library support,, Interoperability, application programming interface (api)

Research Agenda Categories

Standards, Technology

Expected Impact Timeframe

Medium

Related Publications

Using the words in this topic description and Natural Language Processing analysis of publications in the AREA FindAR database, the references below have the highest number of matches with this topic:

• Romli, R., Razali, A. F., Ghazali, N. H., Hanin, N. A., & Ibrahim, S. Z. (2020). Mobile Augmented Reality (AR) Marker-based for Indoor Library Navigation. IOP Conference Series: Materials Science and Engineering, 767, 012062.
• Cervera-Uribe, A. A. (2017). [POSTER] The Augmented Library: An Approach for Improving Users Awareness in a Campus Library. 2017 IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR-Adjunct).
• Cavallo, M., & Forbes, A. G. (2019). CAVE-AR: A VR Authoring System to Interactively Design, Simulate, and Debug Multi-user AR Experiences. 2019 IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces (VR).
• Gupta, S., Chaudhary, R., Gupta, S., Kaur, A., & Mantri, A. (2019). A Survey on Tracking Techniques in Augmented Reality based Application. 2019 Fifth International Conference on Image Information Processing (ICIIP).
• Joshi, Y., & Poullis, C. (2020). Portal to knowledge: a virtual library using marker-less augmented reality system for mobile devices. Optical Architectures for Displays and Sensing in Augmented, Virtual, and Mixed Reality (AR, VR, MR)

More publications can be explored using the AREA FindAR research tool.

Author

Christine Perey

Last Published (yyyy-mm-dd)

2021-08-31

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