Knowledge-based augmented reality
Communications of the ACM - Special issue on computer augmented environments: back to the real world
Calibration Requirements and Procedures for a Monitor-Based Augmented Reality System
IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics
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The fledgling field of wearable computers, where augmented reality (AR) technologies will play a critical role, recently attracted 400 enthusiasts to MIT for the Wearables Computer Symposium. (Editor's note: See Joan Truckenbrod's symposium review later in this issue.) The well-established ACM UIST Conference, held the following week, gathered only half that number. I was intrigued by this phenomenon and decided to learn more about AR. The most up-to-date reference is the August 1997 issue of the MIT Press journal Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Reality [4] which is dedicated to describing state-of-the-art AR (abstracts are under the "Science and Technology" category at http://mitpress.mit.edu/ journals.tcl). Distilled from the August issue of Presence and a few other sources, the following article gives a quick introduction to AR.AR, sometimes called mediated reality, has an interesting past and a bright future. It will probably surprise no one that Ivan Sutherland, the father of interactive computer graphics, is also credited with inventing AR. In 1968 Sutherland built a head-mounted display (HMD) with monochrome monitors and mirrors. The half-silvered mirrors enabled the observer to see through the computer graphics display into the real world. That was 30 years ago. It seems likely that 30 years (or less) from now some people will choose to be constantly on-line via lightweight non-obtrusive glasses capable of dynamically compositing or blending high-resolution stereo 3D graphics with a view of the real world.