RealityCheck: A Tool to Evaluate Spatial Inconsistency in Augmented Reality
Carter Slocum, Xukan Ran, Jiasi Chen
Abstract
In augmented reality (AR), virtual objects can drift away from their original intended locations, significantly impairing a user’s experience. Traditionally, a virtual object’s drift is approximated by the device localization drift, which is measured using specialized hardware such as 3D scanners or laser-based positioning systems. However, with AR rapidly becoming more popular, there is a need for a lightweight, software-based approach to evaluate the drift of virtual objects. This software should be easy for researchers and developers to use, without requiring specialized hardware or extensive environment setup.Towards this, this paper presents RealityCheck, an opensource AR evaluation tool that reports the drift of AR virtual objects in the world coordinate system, requiring only paper printouts and minimal modifications to the AR app. RealityCheck is designed to measure the drift of a virtual object across time of a single user, as well as the positioning differences of the same virtual objects as seen by multiple users. Our prototype is implemented on an Android smartphone running the ARCore platform, and evaluated in indoor and outdoor scenarios under a variety of user mobility patterns with traces of different lengths. We compared the results of RealityCheck with the ground truth position of the virtual object, and showed that RealityCheck matches the ground truth within 1.5 cm on average.