Evaluation of the ARCore Indoor Localization Technology

Abstract

Augmented reality has become a very powerful tool nowadays. With the recent technological advance, smartphones have the ability to display augmented content on the screen. What makes the difference is the naturalness with which the multimedia content is superimposed over the video stream acquired with the phone's camera. This perfect overlay depends on the accurate estimation of the position and orientation of the smartphone's camera relative to the 3D representation of the space. ARCore is an augmented reality framework that computes the position and orientation of the smartphone. In order to assess the possibility of integrating ARCore within a virtual and augmented reality platform, we evaluated the accuracy of the ARCore localization technology, using the HTC Vive system as a reference. We designed an evaluation methodology, along with visualization tools that enable a thorough comparison between these two technologies.