an idea

This idea came up to me when I was working on the last excersice of the Augmented Reality Praktikum^?. We had to calibrate a pointing device that simply consisted of an stick with and cube on one end that was covered with five marker. Because there are the five markers and always one of them are visible you can track this device without concerning who to hold the stick.

scenario

I think of a room where about three cameras are mounted on the ceiling. The user wears a head-mounted display and holds the mentioned pointing device. The HMD is also tracked by the cams. And now the user can move freely through the room and draw real 3D-objects by clicking and dragging as you are used to in other 3D-software. But the real feature is that you do not have a 2D-mouse as an input device but an real 3D-input device.

technologies

In my fist thoughts I would implement every cam as a DWARF service and an integrating service that combines the different cams. So you could easily add more cams and increase the usability. As the HMD is tracked you do not need to have trackers in the view of the HMD.

Another option could be, that you do not use the AR Toolkit for tracking but perhaps ART as installed at the AugmentedRealityLabor. -- MichaelSiggelkow - 29 Sep 2004