Towards Anywhere Augmentation Curriculum Vitae Abstract towards Anywhere Augmentation

Towards Anywhere Augmentation Stephen DiVerdi For Augmented Reality (AR) technologies to experience wide-spread adoption, the barrier to entry must be reduced significantly. In particular, setup costs of new systems in new environments are prohibitive for high-fidelity augmentation. The goal of this thesis is to take first steps towards an overall reduction in these costs. The main AR challenges that I focus on in this thesis are realistic lighting of virtual geometry, registration of polygons with the scene, tracking a user in a mobile context, creation of 3D annotations, and acquisition of the scene lighting environment. Each of these challenges is a fundamental component of many AR systems that commonly requires laborious setup in new environments. The contributions presented in this thesis directly address these challenges, lowering the startup costs. My first contribution is to enable more realistic lighting in AR applications by dynamically measuring the lighting environment to accurately shade virtual objects, and to use the video image to facilitate application of virtual light sources to dynamic physical geometry. Realistic lighting also depends on accurate reg-