Appearance transfer for augmented reality

Abstract

Prototyping is an important phase of designing a product. It involves creating an early model of the final product and evaluating the visual appearance under different lighting conditions with different materials applied. There are two distinct approaches to creating a prototype: creating a physical prototype, or creating a virtual prototype. A physical prototype is usually formed out of clay or Plasticine, resulting in an untextured model. This model only conveys the form, but omits the actual material, not showing the final appearance of the object under different lighting conditions. A virtual prototype approach consists of a 3D geometric model combined with image synthesis algorithms, offering a convincing textured preview of the final product. This approach allows to quickly apply different textures, but is limited by the selection of materials available. We propose a new method which combines the advantages of the physical and virtual approaches, allowing to directly transfer the material of a physical reference object to another. Our goal is to design a method which is fast enough to allow relighting the source object and see the lighting dynamically change on the destination object in real time. We introduce a setup which is portable and only consists of components that are widely available. This allows the user to easily transport the setup to new locations, with the setup not requiring much time to be assembled.