Trends in Augmented Reality Tracking, Interaction, and Display

Trends in Augmented Reality Tracking, Interaction, and Display: A Review of Ten Years of ISMAR [1]

Synopsis

This paper surveys the last 10 years of publications in the Augmented Reality area (among a popular subset of all publications) and identifies the research directions in the field. It focuses primarily on tracking, interaction, and display research.

Strengths

  1. The survey covers the most significant (at least according to the authors) publications in the augmented reality community.
  2. Provides a "commonly accepted definition" of augmented reality by listing Azuma's three characteristics: "(1) combines real and virtual imagery, (2) is interactive in real time, and (3) registers the virtual imagery with the real world."
  3. Identifies requirements for an "effective AR experience": (1) effective graphics rendering, (2) effective tracking of the position of the viewer, (3) precise alignment of real and virtual views, (4) display hardware that merges both views, (5) additional available compute power for the underlying simulation application, and (6) interaction techniques that allow the user to manipulate the virtual content.
  4. Effective tracking still seems to be the major problem in AR, with authoring now being recognized as a difficulty.
  5. The most cited paper is one on tracking (Kato and Billinghurst, "Marker tracking and HMD calibration for a video-based augmented reality conferencing system" from 1999).
  6. Primary display techniques are see-through, head-mounted displays, projection-based displays, and handheld displays.
  7. Multi-projector displays (including low-power miniature projectors) could solve several problems, including self-occlusion, and provide more flexibility.
  8. Three import research areas for the future include: (1) ubiquitous computing, (2) "tangible bits" (tangible user interfaces), and (3) sociological reasoning.
  9. A problem area: If a screen is not touch-sensitive but can be touched, it diminishes the effect of interaction.
  10. Another missing research area: "affective (emotional) user interfaces" (detecting and responding to the emotion of the user).

Weaknesses

  1. Although the ISMAR conferences are important, only 27% of the most cited AR papers in Google Scholar came from that conference series.
Bibliography