AUGMENTING REALITY ON EVERYDAY OBJECTS

Team: Anirudh Sharma, Lirong Liu, Pattie Maes, MIT. Published as thesis, and research papers at ACM UIST, and TEI Conference.

A series of explorations in which we introduce AR into everyday interactions which enable non-obtrusive interaction with digital information. 

  • Glassified, – A ruler has two fundamental functions: 1) to draw straight lines and 2) to measure dimensions. Through our Glassified prototype, we aim at extending those capabilities.  It’s a modified ruler with a transparent display to supplement physical strokes made on paper with virtual graphics. Because the display is transparent, both the physical strokes and the virtual graphics are visible in the same plane. A digitizer captures the pen strokes in order to update the graphical overlay, fusing the traditional function of a ruler with the added advantages of a digital, display-based system. 
  • Augmented Magnifier: In this project we explore the fusion of magnifying properties of glass and digital augmentation of transparent displays – combining two layers of information: digital and optical. We use a transparent OLED display overlayed on the magnifying glass, and computer vision to detect objects. The system then computers and pulls metadata about the physical object from an online data source.
  • LittleAR: LittleAR is a 2-inch transparent OLED and a mouse sensor combined in a form similar to a paper bookmark. The design naturally affords translation on paper such that the user can move it along paper similar to a magnifying glass. The advantage of using a thin OLED display is that it allows graphical augmentations to be almost in the same plane as the paper, which creates a seamless fusion of the virtual and real world. This preserves the aesthetics of the printed books while giving the user an option to see the printed text/image augmented with dynamic text and graphics.

Source code for Glassified 0.1 is released. Its kind of messy right now but you should be able to compile it with VS2010 .

Related Explorations

Glassified Optical Tracking and content mapping

Augmented Magnifier: the system preserves both the regular functionality of a magnifying glass and the digital capability of transparent displays on the same plane

Little AR

Using a mouse optical sensor for on paper tracking