15th International Conference on Artificial Reality and Telexistence

Due to the fall in cost and availability of projection technology, personal computers and graphics hardware, there has been a considerable interest in exploiting SAR systems in universities, research laboratories, museums, industry and in the art community.

Parallels to the development of virtual environments from head-attached displays to spatial projection screens can be clearly drawn. We believe that an analog evolution of augmented reality has the potential to yield a similar successful factor in many application domains. Thereby, SAR and body-attached AR are not competitive, but complementary.

This seminar will present state-of-the-art concepts, details about hardware and software implementations, and current areas of application.

It draws parallels between displays techniques used for virtual reality and augmented reality and stimulate thinking about the alternative approaches for AR.

Covered Topics:

1. Introduction to Augmented Reality and its variations (optical see-through and video see-through)
   
2. Overview over current AR Display Approaches (head-attached, hand-held, and spatial)
   
3. Enabling Technology (optical combiners, projectors, and GPUs)
   
4. Spatial Optical Combination (rendering techniques to drive AR displays applying spatial optical elements, such as mirrors, transparent projection surfaces, and holograms)
   
5. Projector-Based Illumination (techniques for creating consistent occlusion and shading effects between real and virtual environments) 6. Projector-Based Augmentation (image correction techniques for augmenting geometrically and radiometrically non-trivial surfaces with projectors)
   
6. Applications of Spatial AR Displays (museums, entertainment and edutainment)
   
7. Summary

Course Material and Further Information:
Course material will be available at: www.uni-weimar.de/medien/AR Further Information can be found at: http://www.spatialar.com/

The second part of the tutorial discusses solutions to the problem of providing multiple tracked viewers with individual stereoscopic images, which has always been a major challenge for VR systems. One of the most promising approaches overlays the images of multiple LCD projectors on top of each other and shutters the projectors and users' eyes in sync. Such systems support co-located interaction between multiple users and require new approaches to the design of devices and interaction techniques.

Short Biography:
Bernd Froehlich is a Professor for Virtual Reality Systems with the Media Faculty at the Bauhaus University Weimar in Germany. From 1997 to 2001 he headed the Scientific Visualisation research at the German National Research Center for Information Technology (GMD). From 1995 to 1997 he worked as a Research Associate with the Computer Graphics group at Stanford University. From 1993 to 1995 Dr. Froehlich was a member of the Responsive Workbench project at GMD. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the Technical University of Braunschweig in Germany in 1988 and 1992, respectively. His recent work focuses on input devices, interaction techniques, display systems, and support for tight collaboration in co-located and distributed virtual environments.