Augmented Reality: Issues, Trends and Challenges
Résumé
Like Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR) is becoming an emerging platform for many applications like, edutainment, audio-visual aids, museums, medical, industry... This keynote surveys the current state-of-the-art in Augmented Reality. It describes work performed in our research team and explains the issues and problems encountered when building Augmented Reality Systems. It summarizes the tradeoffs and approaches taken so far to overcome these problems and speculates on future directions. The survey reviews some technologies, approaches and techniques that have been encountered in sensors representation, robust estimation for registration and tracking. Head-worn and hand-held devices and corresponding techniques are reviewed. A stress is made on numerous approaches, for marker or markerless tracking, developed by the Augmented Reality community, beginning with those that are based on point or planar fiducial marks and going on to those that avoid the need to engineer the environment by using natural features. A precise, fast, and robust registration between synthetic augmentations and the real environment is one of the most important tasks for augmented reality. For example, to achieve this for a moving user requires the system to continuously track the user's position within the environment. Thus the tracking and registration problem is one of the most fundamental challenges in AR research today. Especially tracking within outdoors environments is still difficult to achieve even with today's technology, such as a Global Positioning System (GPS) in combination with relative measuring devices like gyroscopes and accelerometers.