Diminished Reality Techniques for Metaverse Applications: A Perspective From Evaluation

The extended reality (XR) is one of the most widely used approaches for accessing the metaverse world. The metaverse and XR aim to blend the virtual and real parts, offering an immersive and interactive experience. Diminished reality (DR) is a subset of XR that specifically addresses the real-time occlusion, removal, and transparency of objects in the environment. As an immersive technology, DR has been utilized in academia and industry to tackle a wide range of engineering problems. However, there is a little investigative work about DR technique evaluations. In this survey, we categorize the state-of-the-art research into two major categories and six subcategories, providing a novel perspective. We further analyze and evaluate the application effects and performance of these approaches from both quantitative and qualitative perspectives, considering the technical performance and user experience of DR techniques. Finally, we provide an overview of potential future directions for DR applications.