Augmented Environment Mapping for Appearance Editing of Glossy Surfaces

We propose a novel spatial augmented reality (SAR) framework to edit the appearance of physical glossy surfaces. The key idea is utilizing the specular reflection, which was a major distractor in conventional SAR systems. Namely, we spatially manipulate the appearance of an environmental surface, which is observed through the specular reflection. We use a stereoscopic display to present two appearances with disparity on the environmental surface, by which the depth of the specularly reflected visual information corresponds to the glossy surface. We refer to this method as augmented environment mapping (AEM). The paper describes its principle, followed by three different implementation approaches inspired by typical virtual and augmented reality approaches. We confirmed the feasibility of AEM through both quantitative and qualitative experiments using prototype systems.