Supporting outdoor mixed reality applications for architecture and cultural heritage

This paper introduces new approaches to enable collaborative outdoor mixed reality design review in the architectural domain as well as outdoor mixed reality experiences in the cultural heritage domain. For this purpose we present the results of three closely related European projects, IMPROVE and CINeSPACE, which are currently succeeded by MAXIMUS, continuing the development of technologies relevant to the two domains. The paper focuses on the base technologies needed to develop usable outdoor mixed reality applications, such as marker-less optical tracking combined with sensor fusion for accurate pose estimation outdoors. Furthermore the paper presents a new visualization system developed within the project, one of the few daylight blocking head.-mounted displays available. In addition to pose estimation and visualization devices, the paper presents a VR framework adapted for the architecture and the cultural heritage domain featuring high dynamic range image acquisition combined with pre-computed radiance transfer rendering to be able to photo-realistically render urban content. For the cultural heritage domain this framework has been extended to allow accurate display and generation of multimedia content super-imposed on a real environment as well as city navigation.