A Mobile Augmented Reality Framework Based on Reusable Components

In recent years, Augmented Reality (AR) has experienced a great growth in the interest of researchers and general public. Commercial applications such as AR browsers, games, and marketing campaigns are gradually becoming more available; however, the need for a flexible authoring solution still remains. The aim of this paper is to present a novel framework to create marker based augmented reality applications for mobile devices. The framework is composed of five main subsystems: a) presentation: with a game engine as the core component, b) tracking: which performs all the computer vision algorithms, c) interaction: composed of a custom visual editor which processes all the inputs to the framework, d) world model: used to store and provide access to the digital representation of the world, and e) context: used to provide status information of the entire system. All the subsystems were used to provide for users a comprehensive way to develop and share prefabricated objects that allow reusability across applications. A particular case, of an interactive “pARabola plotting” application, is presented to demonstrate the efficiency of the framework. The application was tested in four mobile devices running Android OS. The experimental results demonstrate the ability of the framework to create usable mobile AR applications, observing better visual and interaction results on the higher quality mobile devices.