Fused Photo: Augmented Reality Staging for Photorealistic Visualization in Online Home Retail

Retail experiences have started adopting Augmented Reality (AR) as a tool to let customers see products in their space before committing to a purchase. Although online retailers use high resolution 3D models to create onsite imagery, limitations in the rendering capabilities of phones require them to optimize models for real-time use, diminishing the visual quality of the experience and widening the gap between what the customer thinks they are buying and what they get. We present Fused Photo, a system that leverages AR to capture the customer’s spatial context and recreate it in a remote rendering environment that then composites photorealistic images of products onto their space. Results show that Fused Photos outperform other AR visualizations in the market both in realism and ability to represent a product’s appearance, while being comparable in quality to photorealistic renders staged manually by artists.