Applying Relief Mapping on Augmented Reality

Augmented Reality is a variation of Virtual Environment (VE) in Virtual Reality (VR). Virtual Reality technologies Virtual Environment makes user experiences immersion inside a synthetic environment and user cannot see the real world. In contrast, Augmented Reality (AR) medium of information added to the real world in registration with the world to combine virtual objects and real world. Technically, Augmented Reality is able to enhance all five senses by adding digital or computer generated information such as images, audio, video, interaction and overlaying them over in physical world. Its most commonly use is visual. Augmented Reality allows the user to see the virtual object blended in real world environment. To apply Augmented Reality to applications used for illustration the architecture or infrastructure of building, 3D visual model is a content which is good way to show obviously architecture's element because it is able to display the appearance of each building part separately responding to camera perspective in real-time. That means AR system have to re-render the digital object every time the viewer changes position even a tiny bit as temporal registration. Therefore, the computations for three-dimensional computer graphics must be considered about rendering system on the observed devices because time lags could be occurred when lacking computational speed while it is operating the imagery overlay on the top of the physical world for each frame. There are mainly constraints that are limited the AR system performance such as limited memory and limited computational capability. To enhance the limitations of handheld devices, this research applies Relief Mapping algorithm to 3D model in Augmented Reality technology to reduce the number of polygons on the facade of Sino Portuguese Architecture which consist of many bas-relief patterns on their facades. Our system uses game engine, Unity3D, for real-time rendering and Vuforia SDK implemented augmented reality application on handheld device. The result of the research after applying Relief Mapping technique instead of using the conventional modeling creation, more than 80,000 polygons/ 1 bas-relief, is to create by having a single polygon per a bas-relief and the quality of visualization is compatible to each other on AR application.