MARBLE: Mobile Augmented Reality Using a Distributed BLE Beacon Infrastructure

Abstract

This paper describes MARBLE, which is a mobile augmented reality system that uses a cluster of off-the-shelf, low power, storage and bandwidth constrained Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacons as an infrastructure. MARBLE efficiently stores and broadcasts minimal visual information of 3D objects and help localize a mobile viewer, who receives, renders, and experiences those 3D virtual objects while walking in the environment, wearing an augmented reality headset or viewing it through a smartphone. Compared to other common indoor AR systems, MARBLE consumes less computation resource, stores and broadcasts 3D objects and shapes data over a very long period, does not require a pre-defined texture pattern to be placed in the scene for camera pose estimation, and is less sensitive to camera capture quality. We conduct a user study to demonstrate that MARBLE is capable of capturing freehand gestures, and when replayed back, a user sees a virtual avatar performing the gestures in the 3D environment in real-time.