Developing augmented reality solutions through user involvement: Dissertation

Augmented reality (AR) technology merges digital information into the real world. It is an effective visualization method; AR enhances user's spatial perception skills and helps to understand spatial dimensions and relationships. It is beneficial for many professional application areas such as assembly, maintenance and repair. AR visualization helps to concretize building and construction projects and interior design plans - also for non-technically oriented people, who might otherwise have difficulties in understanding what the plans actually mean in the real context. Due to its interactive and immersive nature AR is applied for games and advertising as well. Although AR is proven to be a valuable visualization method it is not yet commonly used in beneficial consumer level applications. This work first finds out reasons for this and then focuses on developing AR towards wider use. The work is threefold: it considers human factors affecting adoption of the technology, economic factors affecting the viability of AR technology, and development of applications and technical solutions that support these factors. In this thesis user centric and participatory methods are used to find out reasons that hinder the use of AR, especially in interior design. The outcomes of the studies are manifold: desired features for AR services, bottlenecks preventing the use, user experience (UX) issues and business viability factors. A successful AR solution needs to have a viable business ecosystem besides a reliable technical framework. The presented application development in assembly guidance and interior design visualization considers UX factors and demonstrates the use of AR in the field of question. A serious bottleneck for using AR in interior design arises from a typical use situation; a consumer wants to redesign a room. The space where the interior design plan is made is not empty and augmentation does not look realistic when the new furniture is rendered on top of the existing furniture. This problem can be solved by using diminished reality, which means that the old furniture is removed digitally from the view. This work presents a diminished realty solution for AR interior design. A complete pipeline implementing diminished reality functionality is described. Algorithms and methods are developed to achieve real time high quality diminished reality functionality. The presented practical solution has a great effect for the whole AR interior design field, and enhances it towards real use. The possibilities of using AR are huge. In order to make beneficial AR solutions, researchers should be able to reveal the users' needs - both existing and emerging ones - and develop technology to fulfil those needs. This thesis demonstrates that this can be achieved by developing augmented reality solutions through user involvement.