An interactive augmented reality furniture customization system

Abstract

Shopping on the Internet has many advantages, compared to shopping on-site. However, shopping on the Internet has limited user experiences, especially for large and heavy furniture products. In addition, users cannot change the materials and dimensions of the online furniture products. As a result, online shoppers often cannot make right purchasing decisions. This paper presents an augmented reality furniture customization system, which provides users the abilities to view and change the materials and dimensions of three-dimensional virtual furniture, within the contexts of real environments. A Kinect is used to track the human body motions. Occlusions for real and virtual objects in different depths are considered to increase the realism of the system. A calibration algorithm is developed to find the depth, IR image, and RGB image information of the Kinect, to improve the image quality in the augmented reality environment. Furniture customization functions are provided to improve user experiences. User test results show that users consider the augmented reality-based furniture customization system realistic and natural to use.