Augmented Reality: A Balance Act between High Quality and Real-Time Constraints

Augmented Reality (AR) constitutes a very powerful three-dimensional user interface paradigm for many "hands-on" application scenarios in which users cannot sit at a conventional desktop computer. Users' views of the real world are augmented with synthetic information from a computer. Current AR research fans out into several different activities, all of which are essential to generating a system which eventually will be able to sustain a truly immersive AR-experience in extended practical applications rather than short laboratory demonstrations. But the current state of technology cannot yet provide simultaneous support for an optimal solution to all aspects of AR. Today's AR systems have to balance a wealth of trade-offs between striving for high quality, physically correct presentations and user modelling on the one hand, and making short cuts and simplifications on the other hand in order to achieve a real-time response. In our work, we have selected two different positions among many possible trade-offs, demonstrating the real-time immersive impression that can be generated with today's technology in one approach, and presenting a glimpse of the future in the other approach, forecasting what quality might be achievable with continuously increasing processing power and data bandwidth. We discuss the trade-offs we made and we present applications in object design, construction, assembly, and maintainance, as well as augmented board games.     «

Augmented Reality (AR) constitutes a very powerful three-dimensional user interface paradigm for many "hands-on" application scenarios in which users cannot sit at a conventional desktop computer. Users' views of the real world are augmented with synthetic information from a computer. Current AR research fans out into several different activities, all of which are essential to generating a system which eventually will be able to sustain a truly immersive AR-experience in extended practical appli...     »