Web-Based Augmented Reality with Natural Feature Tracking and Advanced Rendering

Despite the existence of many well-designed augmented reality (AR) applications, most of these apps target specific hardware and platform, and few of them render virtual objects which are coherent with the real world. This paper presents an AR application with rendering effects that would increase the consistency between virtual and real world. The application adopts web-based technologies which enables it to run on different machines (mobile, PC) and platforms (windows, android, iOS) without modifications. The virtual objects are rendered with techniques such as cube mapping, and GLSL shaders to model various materials without the need for special setup or extra offline computations. Furthermore, the application uses natural feature tracking for image registration which makes it applicable for both indoor and outdoor scenarios. The results show that the application runs at real-time rates on PC browsers with significant improvement in the visual coherence of the final rendered scene, and at interactive rates on the mobile device.