Designing real-time vision based augmented reality environments for 3D collaborative applications

Augmented reality (AR) is a variation of virtual reality. It allows the user to see computer generated virtual objects superimposed upon the real world through the use of some kind of see-through head-mounted display. Human users of such system can interact with the virtual world and have additional information, such as character description of physical objects and instruction for performing physical tasks in form of annotation, speech instruction, image, and 3D model. This paper describes our work of building a wireless augmented reality prototype, which supports video-based 3D graphics and a keyboard interface over wearable computers to interact with virtual objects. A new technique for identifying real world objects and estimating their coordinate systems is introduced. The method utilizes a binary square marker, which can identify a great number of real world objects with markers tagged on them by using computer vision techniques.