Jessica Van Brummelen, Liv Piper Urwin, Oliver James Johnston, Mohamed Sayed, Gabriel Brostow

At CHI this year, Niantic researchers will present “Don’t Look Now: Audio/Haptic Guidance for 3D Scanning of Landmarks,” a paper where we investigate ways to make the process of making digital scans of objects in the real world easier and more engaging. 

Understanding the real world is a major part of our work at Niantic – and technology for scanning 3D objects and scenes is critical. Only when we map and understand the world can we place digital objects within it in a realistic, useful and believable way.

But scanning is not an easy process, especially for non-experts. In this paper, our researchers investigated the hypothesis that by moving people’s attention away from their screens while scanning, they’d be better able to observe the world around them, and, in turn, produce better scans, while feeling less anxious in the process. We achieved this by using audio and haptic guidance, rather than on-screen indicators. While the new approach didn’t necessarily improve people’s feelings around safety and comfort of scanning, it made the process more engaging and yielded superior scans.

Our hope is that this research sparks further exploration into the use of audio and haptic feedback in 3D scanning - the future of augmented reality may depend on it!

For more, read the full paper and videos at our Github.