Abstract
Augmented Reality technology has become increasingly popular with numerous companies investing in the design and development of solutions. In order to demonstrate their new investments, promotional content is created that conveys the technology in a convincing manner. Demonstration videos with newly available head-mounted displays succeed in illustrating the concept of a user’s immersion in an Augmented Reality, but in doing so, the actual quality of the user’s visual experience is often neglected.
Augmented Reality has been a topic of research for decades and to this day, there are still no productive augmented reality head-mounted display systems on the market. This is due to the plethora of hardware and software related challenges involved in the development of such systems. Furthermore, a significant subset of the aforementioned challenges is not yet solved, and no framework exists providing a systematic analysis identifying the areas that need to be addressed. This thesis provides such a framework.
To bridge the gap between the demonstrative and productive level systems, we designed a visual components framework, which provides a structured approach for a systematic inquiry into the problems associated with Augmented Reality, where the focus is set on occlusion and interaction. We developed a flexible prototype based on the framework, and produced content for the purpose of supporting this inquiry. Guidelines for the work of researchers and developers are given in order to produce real-world, application capable Augmented Reality systems.