Instant Motion Tracking and Its Applications to Augmented Reality

TL;DR

This paper introduces a real-time mobile motion tracking system for augmented reality that robustly tracks planar targets and performs 6DoF tracking without calibration, enabling immersive AR experiences on hundreds of millions of devices.

Contribution

A novel mobile motion tracking system capable of robust planar and 6DoF tracking without calibration, suitable for real-time AR applications on smartphones.

Findings

System runs in real-time on mobile phones

Successfully deployed in major products on hundreds of millions of devices

Achieves robust tracking without calibration

Abstract

Augmented Reality (AR) brings immersive experiences to users. With recent advances in computer vision and mobile computing, AR has scaled across platforms, and has increased adoption in major products. One of the key challenges in enabling AR features is proper anchoring of the virtual content to the real world, a process referred to as tracking. In this paper, we present a system for motion tracking, which is capable of robustly tracking planar targets and performing relative-scale 6DoF tracking without calibration. Our system runs in real-time on mobile phones and has been deployed in multiple major products on hundreds of millions of devices.