The City of Sights: Design, construction, and measurement of an Augmented Reality stage set

We describe the design and implementation of a physical and virtual model of an imaginary urban scene—the “City of Sights”— that can serve as a backdrop or “stage” for a variety of Augmented Reality (AR) research. We argue that the AR research community would benefit from such a standard model dataset which can be used for evaluation of such AR topics as tracking systems, modeling, spatial AR, rendering tests, collaborative AR and user interface design. By openly sharing the digital blueprints and assembly instructions for our models, we allow the proposed set to be physically replicable by anyone and permit customization and experimental changes to the stage design which enable comprehensive exploration of algorithms and methods. Furthermore we provide an accompanying rich dataset consisting of video sequences under varying conditions with ground truth camera pose. We employed three different ground truth acquisition methods to support a broad range of use cases. The goal of our design is to enable and improve the replicability and evaluation of future augmented reality research.