Arya Rajiv Chaloli, K Anjali Kamath, Divya T Puranam and Preet Kanwal, PES University Bangalore, India

Augmented Reality (AR) is one of the most popular trends in, technology today. Its accessibility has heightened as new smartphones and other devices equipped with depth-sensing cameras and other AR- related technologies are being introduced into the market. AR helps the user view the real-world environment with virtual objects augmented in it. With advances in AR technology, Augmented Reality is being used in a variety of applications, from medicine to games like Pokémon Go, and to retail and shopping applications that allow us to try on clothes and accessories from the comfort of our homes. In the current times, being hands-off is utterly important due to the widespread attack of the COVID19 pandemic. Thus, an application where the necessity to touch a screen is removed would be highly relevant. In such a scenario, AR comes into play. Essentially, it helps to convert the contents on a physical screen to a virtual object that is seamlessly augmented into reality and the user interacts only with the virtual object, thus avoiding any requirement to touch the actual physical screen and making the whole system touch-free. Hence, the paper aims to propose an Augmented Reality application system that can be integrated into our day-to-day life. With the advent of technology and the digitization of almost all interfaces around us, the opportunity of augmenting these digitized resources has escalated. To demonstrate a generic application that can be used along with any digitized resource, an AR system will be implemented in the project, that can control a personal computer (PC) remotely through hand gestures made by the user on the augmented interface. The methodology proposed targets to build a system that is both generic and accessible. The application is made generic by making the AR system be able to provide an AR interface to any application that can run on a regular PC. The accessibility of the AR system is improved by making it compatible to work on any normal smartphone with a regular camera. There is no necessity for a depth- sensing camera, which is a requirement of popular AR toolkits like ARCore and ARKit.

Augmented reality, Gesture Recognition, Generic, Application, Technology, Accessibility.