User-Driven View Management for Wearable Augmented Reality Systems in the Cultural Heritage Domain

The recent availability of low cost wearable augmented reality (WAR) technologies, is leveraging the design of applications in many different domains in order to support users in their daily activities. For most of these domains, the large amount of information displayable on top of the reality, directly in the user's field of view, represents an important challenge for designers. In this paper we present a view management technique for placing touristic/cultural information, in the form of points of interest (POIs), in an AR system that works in the absence of a priori knowledge of the real environment. The user-driven view management technique, designed as a remote service, improves representation and displacement of the digital information each time the user manifests an interest in a particular area of the real space. The proposed approach includes a layout algorithm, which exploits the user's local position and her/his point of view direction, to correctly set the POI height in the user's view avoiding overlapping and cluttering, together with an adaptive rendering method, using information about the brightness of the area, that computes the visual appearance parameters of each virtual POI in order to improve its readability over the background.