Taking Augmented Reality out of the Laboratory and into the Real World
Christian Sandor
Abstract
During the last decade, mobile information browsing on mobile phones has become a widely-adopted practice. This was made possible by the increase of wireless networking infrastructure and computing power of mobile phones. However, there are several challenges in human-computer interaction related to mobile information browsing. One fundamental limitation is the small screen of current mobile internet devices. Therefore, many researchers are investigating ways to display information efficiently; a research area also known as Information Visualization. A second challenge is based on the huge increase of available online data that refers to objects in the real world. How can users understand these references easily? A promising approach to this challenge is to employ Augmented Reality (AR), a user interface technology that can overlay computer graphics over a video image of the real world.
So far, most AR systems have mainly been used and tested in synthetic laboratory environments. A related problem is that many AR systems have targeted toy applications that are of mere academic interest, but fail to address the real needs of lay people. Due to these problems, until now, no AR system has been developed that would influence development of consumer devices on a large scale. In the Wearable Computer Lab, we are taking these challenges seriously and are recently focusing on building systems that are evaluated with lay people from the street. This presentation will report about our experiences of the first steps for creating next-generation, AR-enabled consumer devices.
Short Biography
Dr. Christian Sandor is the Deputy Director of the Wearable Computer Lab at the University of South Australia. He believes that Augmented Reality (AR) has the potential to become the dominating user interface paradigm for mobile information access. To help realizing this potential, his key research question is: what are the fundamental user interface primitives for AR? While such primitives have been established for desktop computers and virtual reality, AR is still in short supply.
From 12/2005 to 7/2007, he has been working at Canon's Leading-Edge Technology Research Headquarters in Tokyo, Japan. There, he has created a design environment that enables users to see and touch virtual objects and invented a 3D cursor for mobile AR.
Before joining Canon, he has obtained a doctorate in computer science from the Munich University of Technology, Germany. Under the supervision of Prof. Gudrun Klinker and Prof. Steven Feiner, he has developed a software framework and authoring tools for distributed AR user interfaces. Using these tools, he has created a variety of applications, ranging from art installations to industrial applications. In a collaboration with BMW, he has worked in an interdisciplinary team to investigate AR guidance systems for car drivers.
