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Overview
The Outdoor Collaborative Augmented Reality Website.

Videos
Download OCAR videos in various formats.

Images
See users navigation the streets of Vienna.

Publications
All project related publications.

Hardware Setup
Hardware platforms behind this work.

Tools
Definitions and tools for world models

For Students
Outdoor Collaborative Augmented Reality related topics for Praktika or a Diploma thesis.

Outdoor Collaborative Augmented Reality

The aim of this project is to investigate how two or more users can interact on such tasks as navigation and information browsing/display with the help of Augmented Reality in an outdoor environment. It is based on the hard- and software developed in the Mobile Collaborative Augmented Reality subproject of the Studierstube research project.

Augmented Reality (AR), enhancing a user’s perception of the real world with computer generated entities, and mobile computing, allowing users to access and manipulate in-formation anytime and independent of location, are two emerging user interface technologies that show great promise. The combination of both into a single system makes the power of computer enhanced interaction and communication in the real world accessible anytime and everywhere.

Applications

A common application that can benefit from immediate access to information is navigation in general. In our work we try to support a pedestrian trying to navigate through a city. Instead of relying on maps and knowledge about the environment a user can enter the desired destination into the system and perceive a series of artifical waypoints blended into her view of the surroundings. Following these waypoints will automatically lead her to the destination.

Another interesting aspect of mobile computing systems is information display and visualization. Tourists can view interesting dates about buildings and places overlayed over their view of the objects of interest. Engineers and architects can perceive information about buildings, virtual models of buildings in place or other abstract information such as cell phone network strength and quality.

Collaboration

A central focus of our work is collaboration. We investigate user interfaces that can support several people equipped with mobile augmented reality setups in the tasks described above. Navigation tasks between several users can include following another user, establishing and finding a meeting point or guiding another user. Shared information displays allow users to highlight information for other participants or control their view of the presented data.

Data processing

Providing data for large scale navigation and information visualization applications is a challenging task. We investigate how an automated workflow from the data source provided by domain experts to the actual application running on the mobile device could be implemented. In the current setup we integrate 3D model data of buildings in Vienna, a waypoint network of accessible streets and address points for each building, and general presentation data into a general world model. In a second step we generate the necessary application data for the different applications. This allows us to handle large models efficiently and without human intervention.

Contact: Gerhard Reitmayr

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