Uploaded December 2019 | Updated September 2026, 2 hours ago

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Augmented reality requires precise and instant overlay of digital information onto everyday objects. We present our work on LightAnchors, a new method for displaying spatially-anchored data. We take advantage of pervasive point lights – such as LEDs and light bulbs – for both in-view anchoring and data transmission. These lights are blinked at high speed to encode data. We built a proof-of-concept application that runs on iOS without any hardware or software modifications. We also ran a study to characterize the performance of LightAnchors and built eleven example demos to highlight the potential of our approach.

Project page: lightanchors.org

Karan Ahuja, Sujeath Pareddy, Robert Xiao, Mayank Goel, and Chris Harrison. 2019. LightAnchors: Appropriating Point Lights for Spatially-Anchored Augmented Reality Interfaces. In Proceedings of the 32nd Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST '19). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 189-196. DOI: doi.org/10.1145/3332165.3347884