The Interactive Media Systems group at Vienna University of Technology dedicates its work to fundamental research and education in the area of multimedia. By multimedia we mean true interaction with complementary and multi-modal information rather than simple aggregation of media pieces.

Our main areas of work are video and multimedia processing, web technologies, and virtual reality.

IMS Showcases Augmented Reality Technology
at SIEMENS Forum Vienna

The Interactive Media Systems group is proud to contribute an Augmented Reality installation to the new “Computerwelten” exhibition at SIEMENS forum.

“Computerwelten” is an exhibition exploring the history of computers, hosted at Vienna's SIEMENS forum. Among diverse exhibits from different eras of computing, the exhibition features an Augmented Reality (AR) technology demonstration created by IMS researchers that seeks to illustrate the current state-of-the-art in interactive media systems. By collaborating to provide SIEMENS forum with this installation, the IMS has again demonstrated its continued commitment to raise awareness of its research work and reach out to broad audiences beyond the academic community.

The exhibition opened its doors to the general public on Jan 31, and will run through June 29, 2003. Admission is free.

tour guide Charlotte S. explains the AEKI installation to local schoolchildren.

The installation, nicknamed “AEKI”, is based on the experimental AR software framework “Studierstube” from the IMS Virtual Reality Research Group and was originally developed by students as part of their coursework.

AEKI is a tool that guides through the assembly of typical do-it-yourself furniture. Such furniture, just like the products sold by IKEA, are infamous for their ambiguous assembly instructions, frequently leaving much to the reader’s imagination. To facilitate this issue, AEKI generates a sequence of 3D graphics, showing a model of the furniture to be built in subsequent steps of construction. It then superimposes that model over the actual view of the scene as captured by a video camera. This sequence can be traversed forward and backwards (hence the name “AEKI”) as necessary.

Top left: the camera view, fiducial markers to track objects of interest. Top right: the augmented view as seen by the user Bottom left: The correct part for the next step is highlighted in the users view. Bottom right: The finished model and furniture.

Unlike printed assembly instructions, these 3D models can be viewed from an arbitrary angle, allowing for easier visualization and verification of the construction process. In addition, every single part has been outfitted with a rectangular marker pattern ("fiducial") to make it recognizable by a computer vision algorithm. In this way the system can identify and highlight the correct piece required for the next assembly step.

Enchanted by the powers of Augmented Reality, this young lady experiences a spontaneous outbreak of joy.

While AEKI is only representing a narrow spectrum of novel tools made possible by AR research, it may well succeed in encouraging visitors to "Computerwelten" to envision how Augmented Reality will change areas of their lives someday -- such as furniture assembly, for that purpose.

For further information or questions about this article, please contact Thomas Pintaric (pintaric@ims.tuwien.ac.at).

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Interactive Media Systems Group
Institute for Software Technology and Interactive Systems
Vienna University of Technology

Favoritenstrasse 9-11/188/2
A-1040 Vienna, Austria

http://www.ims.tuwien.ac.at/