Development and evaluation of high resolution monocular video see-through display

The interactive working support technology can help to perform tasks requiring advanced skills by giving appropriate working instructions interactively depending on the working situation even if a worker is not an expert. In this technology, an image presentation device is an important human interface to present the working instructions efficiently to the worker, because the image can provide a lot of information at one time. Therefore, the video see-through display is being developed as a human interface which presents the working instructions to the worker. The video see-through display consists of a camera and a display. At first, the image of a working object is captured by the camera. The working instructions will be drown by computer graphics (CG) on the captured real image. Then, the synthetic image is presented to the worker through the display. By following the presented working instructions, the worker will be able to perform the tasks efficiently. So far, we applied this technology to the manufacturing tasks, using a video see-through display we have developed, and confirmed the effectiveness of the image presentation technique we have proposed. However, there is still a problem with a low resolution when a commercially available small camera and a small display are used. In addition, the image quality is not wholly satisfactory with problems such as the distortion of the image. For this reason, it was difficult to be applied to detailed assembly tasks. That is, in order to perform more precise tasks on manufacturing site, it is desirable to develop the display system which can present higher resolution image. In this paper, the relation between the display resolution and the equivalent eyesight of presented image is discussed. And a system construction that achieves the presentation of the high-resolution image is examined. As a result of the examination, a high-resolution monocular video see-through display using full high-definition video camera and d- splay, is developed. Furthermore, in order to confirm the basic effectiveness of the system, some results of the evaluation experiments using some operators are reported.