LightAnchors: Appropriating Point Lights for Spatially-Anchored Augmented Reality Interfaces

Augmented reality requires precise and instant overlay of digital information onto everyday objects. We present our work on LightAnchors, a new method for displaying spatially-anchored data. We take advantage of pervasive point lights – such as LEDs and light bulbs – for both inview anchoring and data transmission. These lights are blinked at high speed to encode binary data. We built a proof-of-concept application that runs on iOS without any hardware or software modifications. We ran a study to characterize the performance of our system and built ten example demos to highlight the potential of our approach.