Spatially Localised Immersive Contemporary and Historic Photo Presentation on Mobile Devices in Augmented Reality.

These days, taking a photo is the most common way of capturing a moment. Some of these photos captured in the moment are never to be seen again. Others are almost immediately shared with the world. Yet, the context of the captured moment can only be shared to a limited extent. The continuous improvement of mobile devices has not only led to higher resolution cameras and, thus, visually more appealing pictures but also to a broader and more precise range of accompanying sensor metadata. Positional and bearing information can provide context for photos and is thus an integral aspect of the captured moment. However, it is commonly only used to sort photos by time and possibly group by place. Such more precise sensor metadata, combined with the increased computing power of mobile devices, can enable more and more powerful Augmented Reality (AR) capabilities, especially for communicating the context of a captured photo. Users can thereby witness the captured moment in its real location and also experience its spatial contextualization. With the help of a suitable data augmentation, such context-preserving presentation can be extended even to non-digitally born content, including historical images. This offers new immersive ways to experience the cultural history of one's current location. In this paper, we present an approach for location-based image presentation in AR on mobile devices. With this approach, users can experience captured moments in their physical context. We demonstrate the power of this approach based on a prototype implementation and evaluate it in a user study.