Section: Application Domains

Mixed and Augmented Reality

Mixed realities consist in merging real and virtual environments. The fundamental issue in this field is the level of interaction that can be reached between real and virtual worlds, typically a person catching and moving a virtual object. This level depends directly on the precision of the real world models that can be obtained and on the rapidity of the modeling process to ensure consistency between both worlds. A challenging task is then to use images taken in real-time from cameras to model the real world without help from intrusive material such as infrared sensors or markers.

Augmented reality systems allow an user to see the real world with computer graphics and computer animation superimposed and composited with it. Applications of the concept of AR basically use virtual objects to help the user to get a better understanding of her/his surroundings. Fundamentally, AR is about augmentation of human visual perception: entertainment, maintenance and repair of complex/dangerous equipment, training, telepresence in remote, space, and hazardous environments, emergency handling, and so forth. In recent years, computer vision techniques have proved their potential for solving key-problems encountered in AR: real-time pose estimation, detection and tracking of rigid objects, etc. However, the vast majority of existing systems use a single camera and the technological challenge consisted in aligning a prestored geometrical model of an object with a monocular image sequence.