UMAR

Mobility means that the context of a device changes over time. Context Awareness (CA) is an area where the goal is to retrieve data about the current context using sensors. The data is used to optimize services and configurations. Such data can consist of position, time, temperature etc. as well as computational resources (i.e. ubiquitous computing). Context data can also be used to query information sources, such as Internet, to retrieve information related to the user's context.

The idea behind Augmented Reality (AR) is to track the position and orientation of the user's head in order to enhance his or her perception of the world by mixing a view of it with computer generated visual information relevant to the current context.

UMAR is a conceptual framework that consists of research areas required to perform Ubiquitous Mobile Augmented Reality where we bridge the real world and the digital domain. For an arbitrary context we want to fetch the relevant information and display it using appropriate technique depending on the spatial relationship between context and retrieved information. If there is a close spatial relationship we would prefer to use AR. If the spatial relationship is weaker we could use a 2D map. If there is no spatial relationship the information could be presented e.g. as a web page. In contrast to specialized HMD configurations, the smartphone can easily switch between modalities.

In the initial phase we ported ARToolkit to the Symbian™ platform for marker-based tracking. The next step will be to extend the tracking capability.

Publications

Henrysson and Ollila.
"UMAR - Ubiquitous Mobile Augmented Reality". To appear at 3rd Mobile Ubiquitous Multimedia 2004, Washington, USA. [pdf]

Henrysson and Ollila.
"Augmented Reality on Smartphones". 2nd IEEE International Augmented reality Toolkit Workshop 2003, Tokyo, Japan. [pdf]

Download

ARlib.zip
Source code for the ported ARToolkit library.

Related Work

Handheld AR
ARToolkit ported to the PocketPC platform.

Video See-Through AR and Optical Tracking with Consumer Cell Phones
AR on a smartphone using 3D markers.

AR-PDA
Client/server setup using a PDA for video capture and display.

Rotuaari
Context-aware mobile multimedia services.

Contact

Anders Henrysson andhe@itn.liu.se
Mark Ollila marol@itn.liu.se