Comprehensible Visualization for Augmented Reality

IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics

193-204

This article presents interactive visualizations to support the comprehension of spatial relationships between virtual and real-world objects for Augmented Reality (AR) applications. To enhance the clarity of such relationships, we discuss visualization techniques and their suitability for AR. We apply them on different AR applications with different goals, e.g., in x-ray vision or in applications that draw a user’s attention to an object of interest. We demonstrate how Focus and Context (FþC) visualizations are used to affect the user’s perception of hidden or nearby objects by presenting contextual information in the area of augmentation. The organization and possible sources of data for visualizations in AR are presented, as well as cascaded multilevel FþC visualizations to address complex cluttered scenes that are inevitable in real environments. This article furthermore shows filter operations and tools to interactively control the amount of augmentation. It compares the impact of real-world context preservations to a pure virtual and uniform enhancement of occluding structures for augmentations of real-world imagery. Finally, this paper discusses the stylization of sparse object representations to improve the comprehension of x-ray visualizations in AR.

pdf