Background

Augmented reality (AR), as one of the most exciting technologies nowadays, has been widely adopted on mobile devices over the last few years. Lots of mobile applications have implemented AR technology into various aspects, such as educational, business, as well as gaming. Examples include Word Lens, Vuforia, and Google Glass.

Storage Size

Along with the development of AR on moile devices, number of problems and limitations were found. The major concern is that AR requires a sufficiently large database for storing image descriptors which are essential for finding the region of interest on a image. Since the storage of majority of mobile devices are relatively small, it is not feasible to put the entire database on the mobile at this moment of time.

Processing Power & Energy Consumption

Another concern of AR is the processing power and energy consumption of mobile devices. Since AR requires large amount of calculations, the processing power becomes one of the important factors that affect the efficiency of AR performance. Moreover, large amount of calculations also imply large energy consumption. Regarding to these problems, people are putting lots of effort on transferring the database and massive calculations from mobile to web server.