Designing and implementing an Spatial Augmented Reality X-Ray

Casting digital-controlled light over real object surfaces, thus creating new textures and special effects, brings to designers and engineers an endless spectrum of possibilities and innovation for their projects. This technology, called Spatial Augmented Reality, can be considered as a kind of "virtual material" that can be manipulated by designers in augmented environments. In order to achieve more knowledge on the use of this technology, we have developed AR X-Ray, a spatial augmented reality tool. Through the use of a portable projector a Virtual X-Ray is emitted over real walls, allowing visual exploration of internal details of buildings (such as pipes and ducts). This paper presents the design, implementaion and results of this project. Some details regarding solutions for technical problems are also discussed, as following: projector tracking, proper registration of synthetic information over real objects and the development of a shader that manipulates the transparency of textures to allow the user to view what is behind objects. 1 Centro Universitário Senac. LPAI Laboratório de Pesquisa em Ambientes Interativos, Av. Eng. Eusébio Stevaux, 823 São Paulo – SP {fabio.rmiranda, romero.tori, cesbueno}@sp.senac.br, [email protected] AR X-Ray: Portable Projector-Based Augmented Exploration of Buildings 48 RITA • Volume XV • Número 3 • 2008