In one case, a series of seasonal panoramas is made available,
turning the user’s mobile display into a “magic lens” that
transforms the environment around the user, allowing them to
experience that location from two seasons at once (the real and the
virtual) as illustrated in Figure 2.
In a second use case, the user is given the opportunity to view a
video of a historically high flood within the park, overlaid upon a
panorama of the location where the video was originally recorded.
Current generation tracking technology limits the accuracy of AR
content registration over a device’s see-through video. To correct
this, a panorama is used as a proxy for see-through video,
allowing accurate registration between the foreground video and
the background panorama.
A third use case for on-location panorama viewing in the AR
trail guide application transports visitors into the center of a ruin
site that is often only visible from afar, as the interior of these
ruins is usually off-limits to visitors (see Figure 3).
Figure 3: Panorama as a portal into inaccessible park locations.
The ruins featured on the left are usually off-limits. The panorama
on the right affords visitors an experience of the inner ruins.