Handheld Augmented Reality Displays

Augmented Reality (AR) can naturally complement mobile computing on wearable devices by providing an intuitive interface to a three-dimensional information space embedded within physical reality. However, existing AR systems like MARS [1] or Tinmith [2], which require a user to wear a notebook computer in a backpack and a head-mounted display (HMD) are expensive, fragile and inconvenient to wear. Thin-client approaches using a Tablet PC or Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) merely as a portable display [3][4] require a dedicated server infrastructure and limit mobility. We believe there is a need for an unconstrained, infrastructureindependent AR display running to fill the gap in situations where traditional backpack systems are too costly and cumbersome, but thin client implementations exhibit inadequate deployability, scalability or interactive behavior. Particular examples include sporadic use over lengthy time spans, in between which devices must be stowed away, mixed indoor/outdoor use in wide-area environments, and massively multi-user application scenarios. This has motivated us to develop a state of the art AR framework targeting lightweight handheld displays.