Section: Application Domains

Multimedia and Augmented Environments

The term Augmented Environments refers collectively to ubiquitous computing, context-aware computing, and intelligent environments. The goal of our research on these environments is to introduce personal Augmented Reality (AR) devices, taking advantage of their embedded sensors. We believe that personal AR devices such as mobile phones or tablets will play a central role in augmented environments. These environments offer the possibility of using ubiquitous computation, communication, and sensing to enable the presentation of context-sensitive information and services to the user. AR applications often rely on 3D content and employ specialized hardware and computer vision techniques for both tracking and scene reconstruction and exploration. Our approach tries to seek a balance between these traditional AR contexts and what has come to be known as mobile AR browsing. It first acknowledges that mobile augmented environment browsing does not require that 3D content be the primary means of authoring. It provides instead a method for HTML5 and audio content to be authored, positioned in the surrounding environments and manipulated as freely as in modern web browsers. The applications we develop to guide and validate our concepts are pedestrian navigation techniques and applications for cultural heritage visits. Features found in augmented environments are demanding for the other activities in the team. They require all kinds of multimedia information, that they have to combine. This information has to be processed efficiently and safely, often in real time, and it also, for a significant part, has to be created by human users.