Here To Stay: Measuring Hologram Stability in Markerless Smartphone Augmented Reality

TL;DR

This paper introduces HoloMeasure, an open-source tool for quantitatively assessing hologram stability in markerless smartphone AR, revealing significant spatial instability across various conditions and highlighting the need for improved pose tracking.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel measurement method and an open-source app to systematically evaluate hologram stability in smartphone AR across multiple devices and environments.

Findings

Holograms exhibit significant spatial instability in most settings

HoloMeasure enables systematic quantitative analysis of AR hologram errors

Results highlight the need for improved pose tracking algorithms

Abstract

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.