HCI Issues in Augmented Reality

Sponsor	Blair MacIntyre blair@cc.gatech.edu 383 CRB
Area	GVU/Graphics/HCI

Introduction

In the context of this work, AR refers to systems that use "personal" displays (see through head-worn displays, or headphones) to augment a user's perception of the world around them with computer generated information.

Over the past years, we (and others) have built a number of augmented reality systems to address many problem domains. For specific examples, see our papers. We would like to continue exploring the uses of augmented reality, as well as investigating certain general issues in greater depth. In particular, I am very interested in exploring HCI issues related to AR systems.

Project

The project is open ended. I am interested in finding students who are interested specifically in HCI and AR. Very little work has been done on deep explorations of HCI issues in AR; part of the reason is technical (the technology is still very primitive, so building "real" systems is hard) and part is researcher bias (most AR researchers come from computer vision, computer graphics and systems backgrounds, and have little interest in serious HCI research).

If you are interested in exploring HCI and AR, please contact me and we can create a project that suits both our interests. I expect such a project will be primarily one of reading and synthesizing information, but I am also open to projects with more active components (e.g., building something) if the student has the right background.

Background

You should read the following papers to learn more about the state of AR (the first two papers) and one example system (the 3rd):

Azuma, Ronald T. A Survey of Augmented Reality. In Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments 6(4):255-385 (August 1997) (available from Ron's old web page here in pdf format)
Ron Azuma, Yohan Baillot, Reinhold Behringer, Steven Feiner, Simon Julier, and Blair MacIntyre (2001) "Recent Advances in Augmented Reality." In IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, 25(6):24-35.
Feiner, Steven, MacIntyre, Blair and Seligmann, Doree. ``Knowledge-Based Augmented Reality.'' In Communications of the ACM 36(7): 53-62, July, 1993. (if you are not an ACM member, see Dr. MacIntyre for a copy. However, you should join; the digital library is useful, and student membership is cheap.)

Deliverables

Meet with Dr. MacIntyre regularly, and communicate over email, to discuss the project
Write a report summarizing your ideas and findings

Evaluation

Based on the report turned in to the sponsor of the project by the due date.