Martinez Plasencia, Diego and Berthaut, Florent and Karnik, Abhijit and Subramanian, Sriram (2014) Through the combining glass. In: UIST '14 Proceedings of the 27th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology :. ACM, New York, pp. 341-350. ISBN 9781450330695
OA_2014_10_UIST_Combiner.pdf - Accepted Version
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Abstract
Reflective optical combiners like beam splitters and two way mirrors are used in AR to overlap digital contents on the users' hands or bodies. Augmentations are usually unidirectional, either reflecting virtual contents on the user's body (Situated Augmented Reality) or augmenting user's reflections with digital contents (AR mirrors). But many other novel possibilities remain unexplored. For example, users' hands, reflected inside a museum AR cabinet, can allow visitors to interact with the artifacts exhibited. Projecting on the user's hands as their reflection cuts through the objects can be used to reveal objects' internals. Augmentations from both sides are blended by the combiner, so they are consistently seen by any number of users, independently of their location or, even, the side of the combiner through which they are looking. This paper explores the potential of optical combiners to merge the space in front and behind them. We present this design space, identify novel augmentations/interaction opportunities and explore the design space using three prototypes.