Blair MacIntyre

Recent advances in augmented reality

In 1997, Azuma published a survey on augmented reality (AR). Our goal is to complement, rather than replace, the original survey by presenting representative examples of the new advances. We refer one to the original survey for descriptions of potential applications (such as medical visualization, maintenance and repair of complex equipment, annotation, and path planning); summaries of AR system characteristics (such as the advantages and disadvantages of optical and video approaches to blending virtual and real, problems in display focus and contrast, and system portability); and an introduction to the crucial problem of registration, including sources of registration error and error-reduction strategies.

The Aware Home: A Living Laboratory for Ubiquitous Computing Research

We are building a home, called the Aware Home, to create a living laboratory for research in ubiquitous computing for everyday activities. This paper introduces the Aware Home project and outlines some of our technology-and human-centered research objectives in creating the Aware Home.

Windows on the world: 2D windows for 3D augmented reality

INTRODUCTION We describe the design and implementation of a prototype When we think of the use of head-mounted displays and 3D heads-up window system intended for use in a 3D environinteraction devices to present virtual worlds, it is often in ment. Our system includes a see-through head-mounted terms of environments populated solely by 3D objects. display that runs a full X server whose image is overlaid on There are many situations, however, in which 2D text and the user’s view of the physical world. The user’s head is graphics of the sort supported by current window systems tracked so that the display indexes into a large X bitmap, can be useful components of these environments. This is effectively placing the user inside a display space that is especially true in the case of the many applications that run mapped onto part of a surrounding virtual sphere. By under an industry standard window system such as X [13]. tracking the user’s body, and interpreting head motion relaWhile we might imagine porting or enhancing a significant tive to it, we create a portable information surround that X application to take advantage of the 3D capabilities of a envelopes the user as they move about. virtual world, the effort and cost may not be worth the return, especially if the application is inherently 2D. We support three kinds of windows implemented on top of Therefore, we have been exploring how we can incorporate the X server: windows fixed to the head-mounted display, an existing 2D window system within a 3D virtual world. windows fixed to the information surround, and windows fixed to locations and objects in the 3D world. Objects can We are building an experimental system that supports a full also be tracked, allowing windows to move with them. To X11 server on a see-through head-mounted display. Our demonstrate the utility of this model, we describe a small display overlays a selected portion of the X bitmap on the hypermedia system that allows links to be made between user’s view of the world, creating an X-based augmented windows and windows to be attached to objects. Thus, our reality. Depending on the situation and application, the hypermedia system can forge links between any combinauser may wish to treat a window as a stand-alone entity or tion of physical objects and virtual windows. to take advantage of the potential relationships that can be made between it and the visible physical world. To make this possible, we have developed facilities that allow X

Support for multitasking and background awareness using interactive peripheral displays

In this paper, we describe Kimura, an augmented office environment to support common multitasking practices. Previous systems, such as Rooms, limit users by constraining the interaction to the desktop monitor. In Kimura, we leverage interactive projected peripheral displays to support the perusal, manipulation and awareness of background activities. Furthermore, each activity is represented by a montage comprised of images from current and past interaction on the desktop. These montages help remind the user of past actions, and serve as a springboard for ambient context-aware reminders and notifications.

RoomAlive: magical experiences enabled by scalable, adaptive projector-camera units

RoomAlive is a proof-of-concept prototype that transforms any room into an immersive, augmented entertainment experience. Our system enables new interactive projection mapping experiences that dynamically adapts content to any room. Users can touch, shoot, stomp, dodge and steer projected content that seamlessly co-exists with their existing physical environment. The basic building blocks of RoomAlive are projector-depth camera units, which can be combined through a scalable, distributed framework. The projector-depth camera units are individually auto-calibrating, self-localizing, and create a unified model of the room with no user intervention. We investigate the design space of gaming experiences that are possible with RoomAlive and explore methods for dynamically mapping content based on room layout and user position. Finally we showcase four experience prototypes that demonstrate the novel interactive experiences that are possible with RoomAlive and discuss the design challenges of adapting any game to any room.

A touring machine: prototyping 3D mobile augmented reality systems for exploring the urban environment

We describe a prototype system that combines the overlaid 3D graphics of augmented reality with the untethered freedom of mobile computing. The goal is to explore how these two technologies might together make possible wearable computer systems that can support users in their everyday interactions with the world. We introduce an application that presents information about our universitys campus, using a head-tracked, see-through, head-worn, 3D display, and an untracked, opaque, hand-held, 2D display with stylus and trackpad. We provide an illustrated explanation of how our prototype is used, and describe our rationale behind designing its software infrastructure and selecting the hardware on which it runs.

Integrating virtual and physical context to support knowledge workers

The Kimura system augments and integrates independent tools into a pervasive computing system that monitors a users interactions with the computer, an electronic whiteboard, and a variety of networked peripheral devices and data sources.

A distributed 3D graphics library

We present Repo-3D, a general-purpose, object-oriented library for developing distributed, interactive 3D graphics applications across a range of heterogeneous workstations. Repo-3D is designed to make it easy for programmers to rapidly build prototypes using a familiar multi-threaded, object-oriented programming paradigm. All data sharing of both graphical and non-graphical data is done via general-purpose remote and replicated objects, presenting the illusion of a single distributed shared memory. Graphical objects are directly distributed, circumventing the “duplicate database” problem and allowing programmers to focus on the application details. Repo-3D is embedded in Repo, an interpreted, lexically-scoped, distributed programming language, allowing entire applications to be rapidly prototyped. We discuss Repo-3D’s design, and introduce the notion of local variations to the graphical objects, which allow local changes to be applied to shared graphical structures. Local variations are needed to support transient local changes, such as highlighting, and responsive local editing operations. Finally, we discuss how our approach could be applied using other programming languages, such as Java.

Living laboratories: the future computing environments group at the Georgia Institute of Technology

The Future Computing Environments (FCE) Group at Georgia Tech is a collection of faculty and students that share a desire to understand the partnership between humans and technology that arises as computation and sensing become ubiquitous. With expertise covering the breadth of Computer Science, but focusing on HCI, Computational Perception, and Machine Learning, the individual research agendas of the FCE faculty are grounded in a number of shared living laboratories where their research is applied to everyday life in the classroom (Classroom 2000), the home (Aware Home), the office (Augmented Offices), and on ones person (Wearable Computing).

Wizard of Oz support throughout an iterative design process

The Wizard of Oz prototyping approach, widely used in human-computer interaction research, is particularly useful in exploring user interfaces for pervasive, ubiquitous, or mixed-reality systems that combine complex sensing and intelligent control logic. The vast design space for such nontraditional interfaces provides many possibilities for user interaction through one or more modalities and often requires challenging hardware and software implementations. The WOz method helps designers avoid getting locked into a particular design or working under an incorrect set of assumptions about user preferences, because it lets them explore and evaluate designs before investing the considerable development time needed to build a complete prototype.