Augmented Reality Techniques in Games

As a consequence of technical difficulties such as unreliable tracking, many AR applications get stuck in the "how to implement" phase rather than progressing to the "what to show" phase driven by information visualization needs rather than basic technology. In contrast, most of today's computer games are set in a fairly realistic 3D environment, and unlike many AR applications, game interfaces undergo extensive usability testing. This creates the interesting situation that games can be perfect simulators of AR applications, because they are able to show perfectly registered “simulated AR” overlays on top of a real-time environment. This work examines how some visualization and interaction techniques used in games can be useful for real AR applications.