An implementation of generic augmented reality in mobile devices

There are two problems in the existing mobile augmented reality (MAR) system, one is the difficulty in developing and the other is the lack of versatile AR observer. To address them, a generic MAR framework was proposed in the paper, which contains three components: a versatile observer which is run on smart mobile device to see the AR effect produced by MAR application, an MAR server that provides network and data service for the MAR application, and an MAR application customizer which is used by developers to tailor their desired applications. The Vuforia SDK is used to implement the observer, and the XML technology is applied to achieve the goal of customizing MAR application. The generic framework enables developers to do code-free development, and provides the convenience of observing different MAR applications by one MAR observer. The experimental results show that this framework reduces the difficulty and time in developing AR application and makes it easy to observing AR effects by users.