All that GLITTERs: Low-Power Spoof-Resilient Optical Markers for Augmented Reality

One of the major challenges faced by Augmented Reality (AR) systems is linking virtual content accurately on physical objects and locations. This problem is amplified for applications like mobile payment, device control or secure pairing that requires authentication. In this paper, we present an active LED tag system called GLITTER that uses a combination of Bluetooth Low-Energy (BLE) and modulated LEDs to anchor AR content with no a priori training or labeling of an environment. Unlike traditional optical markers that encode data spatially, each active optical marker encodes a tag’s identifier by blinking over time, improving both the tag density and range compared to AR tags and QR codes.We show that with a low-power BLE-enabled micro-controller and a single 5 mm LED, we are able to accurately link AR content from potentially hundreds of tags simultaneously on a standard mobile phone from as far as 30 meters. Expanding upon this, using active optical markers as a primitive, we show how a constellation of active optical markers can be used for full 3D pose estimation, which is required for many AR applications, using either a single LED on a planar surface or two or more arbitrarily positioned LEDs. Our design supports 108 unique codes in a single field of view with a detection latency of less than 400 ms even when held by hand.