Interactive Focus and Context Visualization for Augmented Reality

In this article we present interactive focus and context (F+C) visualizations for augmented reality (AR) applications. We demonstrate how F+C visualizations are used to affect the user's perception of hidden objects by presenting contextual information in the area of augmentation. We carefully overlay synthetic data on top of the real world imagery by taking into account the information that is about to be occluded. Furthermore, we present operations to control the amount of augmented information. Additionally, we developed an interaction tool, based on the magic lens technique, which allows for interactive separation of focus from context. We integrated our work into a rendering framework developed on top of the Studierstube augmented reality system. We finally show examples to demonstrate how our work benefits AR.