Interactive 3D Car Customization for Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality Applications

Abstract

Current automotive visualization systems are based on marker-based AR or standard 2D configurators which restricts user interaction, flexibility, and visualizations. Despite the fact that AR/VR technologies have been applied in many industries including product visualization, there is a need for a marker-less and interactive car customization system allowing intuitive placement and real-time editing of 3D car model on mobile devices. To fill this gap, this paper suggests an approach for the creation of a marker-less AR/VR-based 3D car customization system created with the help of Unity game engine and AR Foundation. Proposed solution allows detecting a real-world planar surface with the help of a mobile device camera and placing a 3D car model on a user-selected surface through touch-based ray-casting. User will be able to interactively customize a vehicle using real-time rotation, scaling, and coloring. The system has been tested for usability and functionality in order to analyze the performance and effectiveness of the interaction, placement and user experience. The results obtained from the experiment prove that the framework offered is capable of offering an accurate placement of objects without markers, real-time customization and high user engagement as compared to traditional methods of visualization. The geometric transforms are carried out using the conventional transform pipeline supported by Unity. From the experiments, it is observed that the proposed application perform faster placement of the 3D car model, saved time in the customization task, had a better usability score and higher task success rate.