3D Augmented Reality Tangible User Interface using Commodity Hardware
This work addresses the need for affordable and interactive AR systems, particularly for applications requiring 3D manipulation, though it appears incremental in its approach.
The authors developed a low-cost augmented reality system with a tangible interface using a colored ball as an input device, enabling real-time 3D interaction on mobile devices, and introduced a fast algorithm for marker registration that improves performance over state-of-the-art methods.
During the last years, the emerging field of Augmented and Virtual Reality (AR-VR) has seen tremendous growth. An interface that has also become very popular for the AR systems is the tangible interface or passive-haptic interface. Specifically, an interface where users can manipulate digital information with input devices that are physical objects. This work presents a low cost Augmented Reality system with a tangible interface that offers interaction between the real and the virtual world. The system estimates in real-time the 3D position of a small colored ball (input device), it maps it to the 3D virtual world and then uses it to control the AR application that runs in a mobile device. Using the 3D position of our "input" device, it allows us to implement more complicated interactivity compared to a 2D input device. Finally, we present a simple, fast and robust algorithm that can estimate the corners of a convex quadrangle. The proposed algorithm is suitable for the fast registration of markers and significantly improves performance compared to the state of the art.