Simulating visually compelling water is difficult especially in Augmented Reality environments where the water has to interact with the user’s surroundings. In this paper, implementations of reflections, refractions and transparency effects that are physically inaccurate but result in visually compelling water simulation in Augmented Reality environments are presented and tested. There are many works on simulating water efficiently; however, they focus on doing this in a scene that is fully virtual. The contribution of this paper is to extend some of these effects so that they also work in Augmented Reality environments which are non-virtual.
The effects are tested by measuring the frames per second. In the end, the methods described in the paper make the water look aesthetically pleasing at around 26 frames per second. It is important to mention that the application is locked at 30 frames per second. This means the water shader is improved with the visual effects for the cost of 4 frames. The frames were measured on an OPPO mobile phone with the model CPH2195.