Augmented Reality article review

Howdy!

Today, I'll look at a SIGGRAPH article from 2005 that discusses augmented reality (AR) interfaces by breaking them down into abstract components. The authors begin by stating that AR has not yet made significant progress beyond the first stage of new interface development - the prototype demonstrations. They claim that while there exist very interesting and intuitive systems for viewing three-dimensional information using AR, there is still very little support for actually creating or modifying content. This claim could probably be argued against in recent years with applications like AR graffiti being developed, but as a field, I still think there is a ton of work to be done in AR

content modification and creation. The article does do a great job of breaking down AR into three

distinct componentS: the physical elements, the display elements, and the interaction metaphor that

links them. The first two parts are probably the easiest to encapsulate and define, and as such,the

interaction metaphors are still fairly limited.

The authors attempt to deal with this limitation by sharing what they call "tangible user interfaces,"

and they go into details of a couple case studies of their own work. The first one, AR MagicLens,

allows users to view inside virtual datasets. The physical elements for this sytem are a simple paper

map for the virtual coordinates and a small ring-mouse that the user can hold. The defined

interaction metaphor is the ability of the user to hold a virtual magnifying glass and peer inside

virtual sets of data. An example they gave was a virtual model of a house that, when viewed with the

virtual magnifier, exposed its frame (also virtually). The second case study, mixed reality

art, basically allowed the user to combine real painting tools with virtual paint, bridge surfaces,

and polygonal models to create virtual works of art on real surfaces.

Both of these case studies are pretty cool, and it would make sense that they probably served as a

basis for other AR applications in the past few years. For our capstone project, I could see the

research of the "mixed reality art" being quite helpful.

That's it for today. Thanks and gig 'em!

article info:
Billinghurst, Mark; Grasset, Raphael; Looser,

Julian; "Designed augmented reality interfaces,"

ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics - Learning through

computer-generated visualization, Volume 39 Issue

1, February 2005.

http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1057803