Augmented reality (AR) applications have gained much research and industry attention. Moreover, the mobile counterpart—mobile augmented reality (MAR) is one of the most explosive growth areas for AR ...applications in the mobile environment (e.g., smartphones). The technical improvements in the hardware of smartphones, tablets, and smart-glasses provide an advantage for the wide use of mobile AR in the real world and experience these AR applications anywhere. However, the mobile nature of MAR applications can limit users’ interaction capabilities, such as input and haptic feedback. In this survey, we analyze current research issues in the area of human-computer interaction for haptic technologies in MAR scenarios. The survey first presents human sensing capabilities and their applicability in AR applications. We classify haptic devices into two groups according to the triggered sense:
cutaneous/tactile
: touch, active surfaces, and mid-air;
kinesthetic
: manipulandum, grasp, and exoskeleton. Due to MAR applications’ mobile capabilities, we mainly focus our study on wearable haptic devices for each category and their AR possibilities. To conclude, we discuss the future paths that haptic feedback should follow for MAR applications and their challenges.
Augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) have played an important role in our society. AR aims to improve our perception of reality, while VR aims to create a new or artificial reality. There ...is no doubt that the results achieved in these two areas are remarkable. It is, however, quite surprising that our understanding of reality is not yet complete. In fact, a better understanding of reality will be essential for future developments in these areas.
Augmented Reality is a technique that enables users to interact with their physical environment through the overlay of digital information. While being researched for decades, more recently, ...Augmented Reality moved out of the research labs and into the field. While most of the applications are used sporadically and for one particular task only, current and future scenarios will provide a continuous and multi-purpose user experience. Therefore, in this paper, we present the concept of Pervasive Augmented Reality, aiming to provide such an experience by sensing the user's current context and adapting the AR system based on the changing requirements and constraints. We present a taxonomy for Pervasive Augmented Reality and context-aware Augmented Reality, which classifies context sources and context targets relevant for implementing such a context-aware, continuous Augmented Reality experience. We further summarize existing approaches that contribute towards Pervasive Augmented Reality. Based our taxonomy and survey, we identify challenges for future research directions in Pervasive Augmented Reality.
The popularity of wearable devices and smartphones has fueled the development of Mobile Augmented Reality (MAR), which provides immersive experiences over the real world using techniques, such as ...computer vision and deep learning. However, the hardware-specific MAR is costly and heavy, and the App-based MAR requires an additional download and installation and it also lacks cross-platform ability. These limitations hamper the pervasive promotion of MAR. This paper argues that mobile Web AR (MWAR) holds the potential to become a practical and pervasive solution that can effectively scale to millions of end-users because MWAR can be developed as a lightweight, cross-platform, and low-cost solution for end-to-end delivery of MAR. The main challenges for making MWAR a reality lie in the low efficiency for dense computing in Web browsers, a large delay for real-time interactions over mobile networks, and the lack of standardization. The good news is that the newly emerging 5G and Beyond 5G (B5G) cellular networks can mitigate these issues to some extent via techniques such as network slicing, device-to-device communication, and mobile edge computing. In this paper, we first give an overview of the challenges and opportunities of MWAR in the 5G era. Then we describe our design and development of a generic service-oriented framework (called MWAR5) to provide a scalable, flexible, and easy to deploy MWAR solution. We evaluate the performance of our MWAR5 system in an actually deployed 5G trial network under the collaborative configurations, which shows encouraging results. Moreover, we also share the experiences and insights from our development and deployment, including some exciting future directions of MWAR over 5G and B5G networks.
: Research proves that the apprenticeship model, which is the gold standard for training surgical residents, is obsolete. For that reason, there is a continuing effort toward the development of ...high-fidelity surgical simulators to replace the apprenticeship model. Applying Virtual Reality Augmented Reality (AR) and Mixed Reality (MR) in surgical simulators increases the fidelity, level of immersion and overall experience of these simulators.
: The objective of this review is to provide a comprehensive overview of the application of VR, AR and MR for distinct surgical disciplines, including maxillofacial surgery and neurosurgery. The current developments in these areas, as well as potential future directions, are discussed.
: The key components for incorporating VR into surgical simulators are visual and haptic rendering. These components ensure that the user is completely immersed in the virtual environment and can interact in the same way as in the physical world. The key components for the application of AR and MR into surgical simulators include the tracking system as well as the visual rendering. The advantages of these surgical simulators are the ability to perform user evaluations and increase the training frequency of surgical residents.
In the original article, there was a mistake in the content of Table 2 page 8 column 1 as published. The values of the mean and standard deviation of the virtual-to-real overlay error in visual ...angles, which are reported for different checkerboard distances, are to be corrected. Due to a typing error within the data analysis code, we mistakenly considered an erroneous value of the average angular resolution for the eye-replacement camera. This scale factor is used to pass from the original registration errors (expressed in pixel) to the angular registration errors (in arcmin). The value of the average angular resolution is \approx 2.67≈2.67 arcmin/pixel. The corrected Table 2 appears below.
This study evaluates the effectiveness of augmented reality (AR) as an e-commerce tool using two products — sunglasses and watches. Study 1 explores the effectiveness of AR by comparing it to a ...conventional website. The results show that AR provides effective communication benefits by generating greater novelty, immersion, enjoyment, and usefulness, resulting in positive attitudes toward medium and purchase intention, compared to the web-based product presentations. Study 2 compares the paths by which consumers evaluate products through AR versus web with a focus on interactivity and vividness. It is revealed that immersion mediates the relationship between interactivity/vividness and two outcome variables — usefulness and enjoyment in the AR condition compared to the web condition where no significant paths between interactivity and immersion and between previous media experience and media novelty are found. Participants' subjective opinions about AR are examined through opinion mining to better understand consumer responses to AR.
•AR-based product presentations generally provide effective communication benefits compared to web-based product presentations.•The positive relationship between interactivity/vividness and usefulness/enjoyment is mediated by a sense of immersion.•The greater consumers' perceived media usefulness/enjoyment in using AR, the more positive the attitude toward AR.•The greater consumers' perceived AR media novelty, the greater is consumers' immersive AR experience.•The greater previous media experience with AR, the lower is consumers' perceived AR media novelty.