Ambient occlusion is a popular rendering technique that creates a greater sense of depth and realism, by darkening places in the scene that are less exposed to ambient light (e.g., corners and creases). Ambient occlusion measures how geometrically occluded each point in the scene is and modulates the ambient light accordingly. In real-time applications, screen-space ambient occlusion approximations are used, due to their great performance and visual quality. However, these screen-space approximations only take the geometry currently visible on screen into account. This results in underestimated or missing ambient occlusion when geometry is hidden from view (e.g., hidden behind other geometry). Our proposal, stochastic-depth ambient occlusion, improves upon traditional screen-space ambient occlusion techniques by including information about geometry at multiple depth layers, using a stochastic transparency based approach. This allows us to efficiently gather the missing information in order to improve upon the accuracy and spatial stability of conventional screen-space approximations, while still maintaining the real-time performance. Our approach integrates well into existing rendering pipelines and we show how it can be generalized to work with different screen-space ambient occlusion techniques and extensions (such as bent normals and cones). We also demonstrate how multi-view stochastic-depth ambient occlusion can greatly improve upon the robustness of traditional multi-view ambient occlusion techniques. Furthermore, we provide an extensive analysis of the visual quality, robustness and performance of stochastic-depth ambient occlusion compared to conventional screen-space approaches.

This report describes the development of a superhuman sports multiplayer game that makes use of augmented reality through the HoloLens. The game is a reenvisioning of the original League of Lasers, a pong/football-esque game for Android phones using camera tracking and special headgear for player positioning. The game was specifically redesigned to use neither a camera or a phone, but instead use the HoloLens' spatial localisation features. The goal of the project is to provide a superhuman sports multiplayer experience on the HoloLens. To be able to provide this, a system for managing spatial anchors and a custom networking architecture were developed, making use of a game server, game clients, a master game client and a web server for sharing anchors. Along with this, large-scale playtests were performed, where data was collected. The corresponding game design changes from the original game are described and implemented to ensure an optimal experience. As the game was developed in Unity with the Mixed Reality Toolkit, software quality was kept at adequate levels throughout the project through a custom CI setup, code written with testability and maintainability in mind through the humble object pattern, and rigorous PR reviewing guidelines. For the development process itself, Scrum was used with weekly meetings, a Waffle project board and daily status reports. Numerous problems with the combination of Unity, the Mixed Reality Toolkit and the HoloLens made the project a laborious endeavour, but the final result and design of the game exceeded our initial expectations.