Modern Approaches to Augmented Reality

Keywords

Augmented Reality, Realistic graphics, Interaction techniques, Image warping, Tracking, Projectors, Optics

Overview

This tutorial provides a survey of modern techniques for augmented reality (AR) systems. Novel approaches have taken AR beyond traditional eye-worn or hand-held displays, enabling new application areas. We discuss conventional AR displays and present alternative augmented reality approaches that are overcoming some of their limitations. These practical alternatives are spatially augmented displays that exploit large optical elements, video-projectors, holograms, and tracking technologies. Due to the fall in the cost of these devices and graphics resources, there has been a considerable interest in exploiting such augmented reality systems in universities, labs, museums and in the art community.

We present state-of-the-art concepts, details about hardware and software implementations, and current areas of application. We plan to draw parallels between displays techniques used for virtual reality and augmented reality and stimulate thinking about the alternative approaches for AR. The goal of AR is to create high level of consistency between real and virtual environments. We describe techniques for optical combination of virtual and real using mirror-beam splitters, transparent screens and holograms. We present projector-based augmentation of geometrically complex and textured display surfaces, which along with optical combiners achieve consistent illumination and occlusion effects.

We will present many spatial display examples, such as Shader Lamps, Virtual Showcasess, Extended Virtual Tables, Interactive Holograms, Apparent Motion, and Augmented Paintings that have been developed, applied and evaluated by the tutorial presenters throughout the years. Finally, we will share our experiences made with such technologies within museums, edutainment, research and industrial areas. By handing out construction drawings, algorithms, and source code we aim to enable participants to realize such systems on their own.

Tutorial Introduction and Overview (Ramesh Raskar, 10mn)

Introduction to today's displays approaches for AR (Oliver Bimber, 30mn)

New Directions in Spatial Augmentation (Ramesh Raskar, 45mn)

Spatial Augmentation using Optical Elements (Oliver Bimber, 45mn)

Prototypes and Experiences (Both, 35mn)

Presenters

Oliver Bimber
Media Faculty, Bauhaus University

Oliver Bimber is currently a Junior Professor for Augmented Reality at the Bauhaus University Weimar, Germany. He invented several AR displays, such as the Virtual Showcase, Interactive Holograms and Augmented Paintings. He published in several journals, such as IEEE Computer, IEEE CG&A, Presence, Computers and Graphics, and at many graphics, AR and VR conferences. Bimber is member of IEEE, Eurographics, ACM and ACM Siggraph. He has exhibited in the Emerging Technology Laboratory of Siggraph'02 and was a speaker in the Siggraph'02 tutorial "Building Interactive Workspaces".

Ramesh Raskar
Research Scientist, MERL - Mitsubishi Electric Research Lab

Ramesh Raskar is a Research Scientist at MERL-Cambridge Research. His research interests include projector-based graphics, projective geometry and non-photorealistic rendering. During his doctoral research at U. of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he developed a framework for projector based 3D graphics, which can simplify the constraints on conventional immersive displays, and enable new projector-assisted applications. He has published several articles on immersive projector-based displays, spatially augmented reality and has introduced Shader Lamps, a new approach for projector-based augmentation. His technical papers have appeared in SIGGRAPH, Eurographics, IEEE VR, IEEE Visualization, CVPR and many other graphics and vision conferences. He was a tutorial organizer for Siggraph 2002 and 2003, and Eurographics 2003. He is a member of the ACM Siggraph, Eurographics and IEEE.