History of Mobile Augmented Reality

This web page summarizes the major milestones in mobile Augmented Reality since 1968. The list was compiled by the member of the Christian Doppler Laboratory for Handheld Augmented Reality for the ISMAR society.

Projector based AR

The hand held projector based Augmented Reality demo using fiducial markers.

10 Best Computer Interfaces

Here is a list of best computer interfaces given at Technology Review.

• The Command Line
• The Mouse
• The Touchpad
• The Multitouch Screen
• Gesture Sensing
• Force Feedback
• Voice Recognition
• Augmented Reality
• Spatial Interfaces
• Brain-Computer Interfaces

Although it appears that Command Line is a history as far as ordinary users are concerned. However, it is the most popular and the best user interfaces with in programmers/developers community, and is not likely to be replaced.

The 41 years old technology, Mouse is perhaps the most used interfaces device along with the keyboard. However, touch screens are now replacing this. Already, a lot of mobile phones are available in the consumer marker with touch screen.

However, the future user interfaces will be based on Gesture recognition, Voice recognition and Augmented Reality (including Spatial). Thus, traditional Screen-Keyboard-Mouse interfaces will be replaced with Camera-Projector-Microphone-Motion Sensors interfaces. The MPAR will be a revolution in Human Computer Interaction, and is beginning to happen now.

Towards Natural Features Tracking

The fiducial markers for AR applications provide robust tracking capabilities. However, it is more desirable to use natural features in the scene to estimate 6 DoF pose of the camera. The Studierstube Team at Graz University of Technology have demonstrated robust Natural Feature Tracking (NFT) for known planar surfaces. They use modified versions (for hand held devices) of SIFT and FERNS to compute and match features in the scene.





More details can be found in the following paper:

Daniel Wagner, Gerhard Reitmayr, Alessandro Mulloni, Tom Drummond and Dieter Schmalstieg, "Pose Tracking from Natural Features on Mobile Phones", ISMAR 2008

An Unbranded Projector Phone

Check this unbranded projector phone on sale at ChinaVision. The price is unbelievable considering features it has. The interface looks remarkably similar to iPhone, while over all look is similar to Nokia.



See Full Specifications.

AIPTEK Pocket Projector

Pocket Projector by AIPTEK:

Explay Projection Engine

The smallest LASER projector is developed by Explay based on technology by Kopin.

See Official Specifications.

Microvision PicoP Projector

PicoP Projector by Microvision:



Laser Pico Projector by Microvision:

3M Micro Projector

Micro projector by 3M:



See Official Specifications.

Optoma Pico Projector

Another product which uses Texas Instruments DLP technology:



See official specifications.

Samsung Projector Phone

Major players in mobile phone market have developed first prototypes after acquiring nano or pico projector technology from third parties. The following videos shows Samsung mobile phone with an embedded projector from Texas Instruments:

Sixth Sense by Fluid Interface Group

The MIT Fluid Interface Group demonstrated a new application of Mobile Projective Augmented Reality (MPAR). They call it SixthSense. Their wearable system converts any surface into interactive display using a mobile nano-projector. The user interaction is done using colored markers on fingers. The system is connected to internet, and able to display real time information related to subject, for example, while reading a news paper, it can display related videos, or while searching for a book, it can display rating and related information from websites such as Amazon or Wikipidea. See the demo videos below:





Here are some of my initial comments after watching above video clips:

1. They don't use any pattern or object recognition, e.g. in newspaper demo, markers can be clearly seen to identify the region to display the video.
2. I doubt they use face recognition to identify the person... However, they are able to project correct geometry on planar as well as non-planar surfaces to some extent..
3. I dont believe they use real time information, e.g. in taxi, the information about airport is displayed on the boarding pass, moreover in this demo, the information on ticket is not read or recognized automatically. However, this could be very interesting application.
4. They did implement some marker based gesture recognition algorithm. However, number of gestures recognized are limited to specific application only.

In summary, its nothing special or new... They have just presented some potential applications of the existing technology. For these applications, a lot of research is required in these domains: pattern or object recognition, natural feature tracking, gesture recognition and data mining.