A practical application of Augmented Reality (AR) is see-through vision, a technique that enables a user to observe a virtual object located behind a real object by superimposing the virtually visualized inner object onto the real object surface. This technique is considered to be effective in several areas, including medical and industrial visualizations.
In these applications, one challenge is determining how to cause a virtual object to appear behind a real object surface. When using video-based stereoscopic displays, if an image of the inner object is simply overlaid onto the real object, a conflict occurs. The binocular disparity depth cue correctly conveys to the observer that the virtual object is farther away than the real object surface. The occlusion depth cue, on the other hand, implies that the virtual object surface must be closer than the intervening real surface, due to the fact that all pixels of the virtual object completely occlude the real surface.
To alleviate this problem, we have proposed a method to overlay a virtual random-dot mask on the surface of a real object in a stereoscopic environment. This method conveys to observers the illusion of observing the virtual object through many small holes. We named this effect as “stereoscopic pseudo-transparency”.
In this research, we introduce our method and show an example application; AR story-telling system. Through the development of this application, we confirmed the effectiveness of our method.

Presenter(s)

Mai Otsuki, University of Tsukuba
Yuko Kamioka, Joshibi University of Art and Design
Yuka Kitai, Joshibi University of Art and Design
Mao Kozaki, Joshibi University of Art and Design
Hideaki Kuzuoka, University of Tsukuba
Hiroko Uchiyama, Joshibi University of Art and Design