Bateau ivre: an artistic markerless outdoor mobile augmented reality installation on a riverboat

Bateau Ivre is a project presented on the Seine River to make a large audience aware of the possible developments of Augmented Reality through an artistic installation in a mobile outdoor environment. The installation could be viewed from a ship by a large audience without specific equipment, through nightly video-projection on the River banks. The augmentation of the physical world was implemented through real-time image processing for live special effects such as contouring, particles, or non-realistic rendering. The artistic purpose of the project was to immerge the audience into a non-realistic view of the River banks that would differ from the traditional tourist tours that highlight the main landmarks of Paris classical architecture. The implemented software applied standard algorithms for special effects to a live video stream and reprojected these effects on the captured scenes to combine the physical world with its modified image. An analysis of the project output reveals that the impact of the effects in mobile SAR varies a lot, and does not correspond to the visual impact on a standard desktop screen.