Augmented Reality in a Wide Area Sentient Environment

• Venue: ISAR '01 Proceedings of the IEEE and ACM International Symposium on Augmented Reality (ISAR'01)
• Year: 2001

Augmented Reality (AR) both exposes and supplementsthe user's view of the real world. Previous AR work hasfocussed on the close registration of real and virtual objects,which requires very accurate real-time estimates ofhead position and orientation. Most of these systems havebeen tethered and restricted to small volumes. In contrast,we have chosen to concentrate on allowing the AR user toroam freely within an entire building. At AT&T LaboratoriesCambridge we provide personnel with AR services usingdata from an ultrasonic tracking system, called the Batsystem, which has been deployed building-wide.We have approached the challenge of implementing awide-area, in-building AR system in two different ways. Thefirst uses a head-mounted display connected to a laptop,which combines sparse position measurements from the Batsystem with more frequent rotational information from aninertial tracker to render annotations and virtual objectsthat relate to or coexist with the real world. The seconduses a PDA to provide a convenient portal with which theuser can quickly view the augmented world. These systemscan be used to annotate the world in a more-or-less seamlessway, allowing a richer interaction with both real andvirtual objects.