Snapshot Augmented Reality - Augmented Photography

Abstract

With the current generation of smartphones augmented reality (AR) finally gets in the hands of end users. This is a giant leap for cultural heritage presentation. But due to software and hardware limitations of consumer devices the AR experience is still lacking the quality we have seen in research projects over the last years. In this paper we are proposing a scalable method for high quality AR presentations for cultural heritage on a wide range of consumer devices: Snapshot Augmented Reality. Instead of a live video stream superimposed with jittering annotations we are "freezing" the scene and enabling Augmented Reality Photography. The result is an interactive scene superimposed on a still image taken by a visitor. In order to outsource processing power and deliver content for a wide range of smartphones most of the sophisticated software works in the cloud. We are describing a reliable and scalable server infrastructure for tracking objects and environments and delivering context aware content to the visitors' devices.