Here To Stay: Measuring Hologram Stability in Markerless Smartphone Augmented Reality
This addresses a key usability issue for AR developers and users, but is incremental as it focuses on measurement rather than solving the instability.
The researchers tackled the problem of hologram instability in markerless smartphone augmented reality by developing a measurement method and app, HoloMeasure, and found significant spatial errors across various conditions, with instability in all but simplest settings.
Markerless augmented reality (AR) has the potential to provide engaging experiences and improve outcomes across a wide variety of industries; the overlaying of virtual content, or holograms, onto a view of the real world without the need for predefined markers provides great convenience and flexibility. However, unwanted hologram movement frequently occurs in markerless smartphone AR due to challenging visual conditions or device movement, and resulting error in device pose tracking. We develop a method for measuring hologram positional errors on commercial smartphone markerless AR platforms, implement it as an open-source AR app, HoloMeasure, and use the app to conduct systematic quantitative characterizations of hologram stability across 6 different user actions, 3 different smartphone models, and over 200 different environments. Our study demonstrates significant levels of spatial instability in holograms in all but the simplest settings, and underscores the need for further enhancements to pose tracking algorithms for smartphone-based markerless AR.