AR-Room: a rapid prototyping framework for augmented reality applications

This paper presents a novel software framework called AR-Room for fast prototyping of a variety of augmented reality applications. AR-Room consists of a lot of deployable components for core augmented reality technologies, modules for hardware abstraction, and an authoring toolkit for the rapid content design. On the AR-Room, application developers are only required to describe their content scenarios together with a configuration of software components. A content scenario is represented by a set of event-action pairs. Four major procedures in an augmented reality application are an image analyzer, an interaction handler, a rendering engine and an image synthesizer. According to the provided scenarios the designated components cooperatively provide real-time analysis and synthesis of input video frames. Several augmented reality applications are implemented on the AR-Room to show how the framework can be efficiently used for the fast prototyping of applications.