Master Thesis
In this section I present just a brief overview of my master thesis work. More detailed information is available on http://www.cmar.se/.
I have done my master thesis together with Miroslav at VITA and our thesis describes our platform for interactive collaborative face to face augmented reality on mobile phones (figure 1). Our platform is called CMAR which stands for Collaborative Mobile Augmented Reality.
Mobile phone augmented reality
CMAR works on mobile phones and uses augmented reality. Augmented reality is a combination of virtual and real. Interactive virtual 3D objects are overlaid on the phone video stream in real time, where the real world is registered in 3D through the mobile phone camera. This is also in general called “the magic lens metaphor”. In our case the mobile phone is the magic lens, where trough the virtual objects can be seen. To register the real world we use optical tracking. This is done with a port of ARToolKit to the Symbian operating system. ARToolKit track markers in the real world. We are using a paper with a marker as shown in figure 2.
Figure 2: The paper with the marker. When the mobile phone camera sees it, perspective and distance can be found.
At this point a virtual object can be overlaid on the video stream from the phone’s camera. When the user moves the phone around it looks like the virtual object is a part of the real world (figure 3).
Figure 3: The marker is tracked through the mobile phone camera and 3D objects, in this case cars, are overlaid with the right distance and perspective parameters.
Real-Time for up to 8 persons
What I and Miroslav have done is that we made it possible for up to eight persons to collaborate and manipulate objects in the same scene. The data is distributed through a Bluetooth network and one of the connected phones acts as a server. The results of individual actions are viewed on the screen in real-time on every connected phone and we made it also possible to connect a PC client to the network for a high resolution overview (figure 5). This computer can then be connected to a projector or a big screen display. An example of a CMAR network is shown in figure 4.
Figure 5: Screenshots from a four user collaboration session and the overall view (CMAR VISION).
DEMO: virtually furnituring an apartment
To demonstrate the features of our platform, we show how multiple collaborators can use consumer phones to furnish a room together with virtual furniture in an augmented reality environment. Watch the videos for more information.
accessible and cheap
This platform is totally independent of a PC server and makes it therefore very portable. Our vision was to create a cheap easily accessible system build on existing technology that novel people can use. The CMAR platform may be used in following application areas: architectural planning, entertainment (games), education and military planning.
Visit http://www.cmar.se/ for more detailed information.
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