Low-latency head-tracking for Augmented Reality

Since the early days, latency in Augmented Reality has been known and has become one of the most popular research topics in AR. There are two types of AR technology, mobile AR and Head-Mounted Device (HMD). Our research considers HMDs because they require a higher precision when the real world is augmented with virtual objects. The delay between head movement and representation of the corresponding movement in the HMD should be minimized to increase the performance of AR. Our approach aims to reduce the latency by adding an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) sensor to the HMD, equipped with a camera to enable the tracking on an open-hardware 3D-printed AR headset. The IMU has been used for the user's head position with low latency. However, the IMU is connected by USB to a the computer that oerfirm the rendering, and we are there conducting experiments to determine the delay between the IMU and frames rendered by the computer with and without game engines. The research concludes that the delay we got from our study between IMU and a computer is 65.73 ms on average, and a little higher when we used a game engine, 87.60 ms on average.