Integration of georegistered information on a virtual globe

In collaborative augmented reality (AR) missions, much georegis-tered information is collected and sent to a command and control center. This paper describes the concept and prototypical imple-mentation of a mixed reality (MR) based system that integrates georegistered information from AR systems and other sources on a virtual globe. The application can be used for a command and control center to monitor the field operation where multiple AR users are engaging in a collaborative mission. Google Earth is used to demonstrate the system, which integrates georegistered icons, live video streams from field operators or surveillance cameras, 3D models, and satellite or aerial photos into one MR environment

Touch-RE: A Touch-based Model Acquiring Method for Personal Manufacturing

Enabled by additive manufacturing technology, personal manufacturing, if realized, will give ordinary people control over their physical world by allowing them to personally program its construction. Currently several pioneering mass customization and personal fabrication applications have been developed for consumer products, gifts, toy, etc. However, one of the core challenges that are remained to be addressed for realizing personal manufacturing is the easiness of creating 3D models for additive manufacturing systems. Current developments in CAD software and reverse engineering are still lacking on the easiness of usage especially for normal users without much experience. In this paper, we present a touch-based 3D-shape acquiring method that is easy and intuitive to use. The key technical challenges on the related hardware and software development are discussed. A testbed system is presented and multiple examples are given to demonstrate its capability.Mechanical Engineerin

Registro espacial 2D–3D para a inspeção remota de subestações de energia

Remote inspection and supervisory control are critical features for smart factories, civilian surveillance, power systems, among other domains. For reducing the time to make decisions, operators must have both a high situation awareness, implying a considerable amount of data to be presented, and minimal sensory load. Recent research suggests the adoption of computer vision techniques for automatic inspection, as well as virtual reality (VR) as an alternative to traditional SCADA interfaces. Nevertheless, although VR may provide a good representation of a substation’s state, it lacks some real-time information, available from online field cameras and microphones. Since these two sources of information (VR and field information) are not integrated into one single solution, we miss the opportunity of using VR as a SCADA-aware remote inspection tool, during operation and disaster-response routines. This work discusses a method to augment virtual environments of power substations with field images, enabling operators to promptly see a virtual representation of the inspected area's surroundings. The resulting environment is integrated with an image-based state inference machine, continuously checking the inferred states against the ones reported by the SCADA database. Whenever a discrepancy is found, an alarm is triggered and the virtual camera can be immediately teleported to the affected region, speeding up system reestablishment. The solution is based on a client-server architecture and allows multiple cameras deployed in multiple substations. Our results concern the quality of the 2D–3D registration and the rendering framerate for a simple scenario. The collected quantitative metrics suggest good camera pose estimations and registrations, as well as an arguably optimal rendering framerate for substations' equipment inspection.CAPES - Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível SuperiorCEMIG - Companhia Energética de Minas GeraisCNPq - Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e TecnológicoFAPEMIG - Fundação de Amparo a Pesquisa do Estado de Minas GeraisTese (Doutorado)A inspeção remota e o controle supervisório são requisitos críticos para fábricas modernas, vigilância de civis, sistemas de energia e outras áreas. Para reduzir o tempo da tomada de decisão, os operadores precisam de uma elevada consciência da situação em campo, o que implica em uma grande quantidade de dados a serem apresentados, mas com menor carga sensorial possível. Estudos recentes sugerem a adoção de técnicas de visão computacional para inspeção automática, e a Realidade Virtual (VR) como uma alternativa às interfaces tradicionais do SCADA. Entretanto, apesar de fornecer uma boa representação do estado da subestação, os ambientes virtuais carecem de algumas informações de campo, provenientes de câmeras e microfones. Como essas duas fontes de dados (VR e dispositivos de captura) não são integrados em uma única solução, perde-se a oportunidade de usar VR como uma ferramenta de inspeção remota conectada ao SCADA, durante a operação e rotinas de respostas a desastres. Este trabalho trata de um método para aumentar ambientes virtuais de subestações com imagens de campo, permitindo aos operadores a rápida visualização de uma representação virtual do entorno da área monitorada. O ambiente resultante é integrado com uma máquina de inferência estados por imagens, comparando continuamente os estados inferidos com aqueles reportados pela base SCADA. Na ocasião de uma discrepância, um alarme é gerado e possibilita que a câmera virtual seja imediatamente teletransportada para a região afetada, acelerando o processo de retomada do sistema. A solução se baseia em uma arquitetura cliente-servidor e permite múltiplas câmeras presentes em múltiplas subestações. Os resultados dizem respeito à qualidade do registro 2D–3D e à taxa de renderização para um cenário simples. As métricas quantitativas coletadas sugerem bons níveis de registro e estimativa de pose de câmera, além de uma taxa ótima de renderização para fins de inspeção de equipamentos em subestações

Towards System Agnostic Calibration of Optical See-Through Head-Mounted Displays for Augmented Reality

This dissertation examines the developments and progress of spatial calibration procedures for Optical See-Through (OST) Head-Mounted Display (HMD) devices for visual Augmented Reality (AR) applications. Rapid developments in commercial AR systems have created an explosion of OST device options for not only research and industrial purposes, but also the consumer market as well. This expansion in hardware availability is equally matched by a need for intuitive standardized calibration procedures that are not only easily completed by novice users, but which are also readily applicable across the largest range of hardware options. This demand for robust uniform calibration schemes is the driving motive behind the original contributions offered within this work. A review of prior surveys and canonical description for AR and OST display developments is provided before narrowing the contextual scope to the research questions evolving within the calibration domain. Both established and state of the art calibration techniques and their general implementations are explored, along with prior user study assessments and the prevailing evaluation metrics and practices employed within. The original contributions begin with a user study evaluation comparing and contrasting the accuracy and precision of an established manual calibration method against a state of the art semi-automatic technique. This is the first formal evaluation of any non-manual approach and provides insight into the current usability limitations of present techniques and the complexities of next generation methods yet to be solved. The second study investigates the viability of a user-centric approach to OST HMD calibration through novel adaptation of manual calibration to consumer level hardware. Additional contributions describe the development of a complete demonstration application incorporating user-centric methods, a novel strategy for visualizing both calibration results and registration error from the user’s perspective, as well as a robust intuitive presentation style for binocular manual calibration. The final study provides further investigation into the accuracy differences observed between user-centric and environment-centric methodologies. The dissertation concludes with a summarization of the contribution outcomes and their impact on existing AR systems and research endeavors, as well as a short look ahead into future extensions and paths that continued calibration research should explore

Corrección del error en el proceso de registro en los sistemas de realidad aumentada utilizando técnicas heurísticas

Desde la masificación de los primeros computadores en la década de los 90’s su uso estaba restringido a desarrollar tareas específicas y cálculos repetitivos. En la actualidad, los computadores y sistemas informáticos están permeando cada vez más las actividades humanas, convirtiéndose en lo que Weiser define como Sistemas Ubicuos [Wei99]. Este nuevo paradigma de interacción humano-máquina implica disponer de interfaces naturales que permitan una comunicación efectiva entre el usuario y la máquina, presentando grandes retos para las ciencias de la computación en cuanto al diseño de sistemas, su modelamiento y, en particular, el desarrollo de las interfaces de usuario. En este contexto, las interfaces deben entrar en consonancia con el concepto de Amplificación de la Inteligencia [Bro96][Bro96a] tal que permita la creación de sistemas capaces de amplificar o mejorar las capaces cognitivas humanas en lugar de imitarlas o reemplazarlas. En esta búsqueda de interfaces cada vez más naturales que extiendan las capacidades perceptivas humanas, surge la creación de nuevos entornos y metáforas de visualización como la Realidad Virtual (RV) y la Realidad Aumentada (RA). En particular, la realidad aumentada aparece como un nuevo paradigma de visualización e interacción humano-máquina que permite al usuario obtener información adicional (información virtual) de su entorno e incluso manipular esta información conservando su relación con el ambiente real. La obtención de dicha información adicional, se logra mediante la superposición en el ambiente real, de información virtual generada por computador. La creación de un sistema de realidad aumentada involucra varias etapas, a saber: calibración de dispositivos, extracción de características, seguimiento y registro. Esta última etapa presenta grandes retos para la creación de un ambiente de RA realista, ya que aquí se une tanto la información virtual como la real; si dicha alineación no es correcta, el sistema será visualmente incoherente. Es por esto que el registro es una etapa crítica que actualmente limita las aplicaciones de realidad aumentada. En la presente tesis, se aborda por medio de técnicas heurísticas esta limitación, que ha sido recurrente en la literatura. Como aporte se propone el uso de técnicas heurísticas, las cuales hasta ahora no han sido abordadas en la literatura, para disminuir el error existente entre la información de posicionamiento obtenida en etapas anteriores al proceso de registro (información estimada) y la información real. Dicha disminución en el error se traduce en un alineamiento real-virtual (etapa de registro) mucho más preciso y coherente, obteniendo en consecuencia sistemas o ambientes que apoyen de manera efectiva los problemas de visualización y acceso a información en una mayor cantidad de aplicaciones./Abstarct. Since the first computers appear in the early 90’s, its use was restricted to perform specific tasks and repetitive calculations. Today, computers are getting mixed in human activities more and more, becoming what Weiser [Wei99] defined as ubiquitous systems. This new paradigm of human-machine interaction implies the availability of natural interfaces that allow an effective communication between the user and the machine. It presents great challenges for computer science related to the systems design and modeling, and in particular, the development of user interfaces. In this context, the interfaces must be in relation with the concept of Intelligence Amplification [Bro96][Bro96a], that allows the creation of systems that can amplify or improve human cognitive perceptions rather than imitate or replace them. In this search for more and more natural interfaces that extend human cognitive capacities, new environments and visualization metaphors such as Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) rose. In particular, augmented reality appears as a new paradigm for visualization and human-machine interaction that allows the user to obtain additional information (virtual information) from his/her environment and even manipulate this information while preserving their relationship with the real world. Obtaining such information is achieved by the overlap in the real environment, virtual information generated by computer. The creation of an augmented reality system involves several steps, namely, device calibration, feature extraction, tracking and registration. This last stage presents great challenges for creating an realistic AR environment, since this stage binds both the virtual and the real information, if the alignment is not correct, the system will be visually incoherent. This is why the registration is a critical stage which currently limits the applications of augmented reality. In this thesis, this limitation is tackle by means of heuristics. Contributions include the use of heuristics to reduce the error between the position information obtained in previous stages to the registration process (information estimated) and real data. This reduction in error resulting in a real-virtual alignment (registration stage) much more accurate and consistent, thus gaining support to systems and environments to solve effectively visualization problems and access to information in a larger number of applications.Maestrí

Towards context-aware mobile web 2.0 augmented reality

Augmented reality (AR) is a Context-aware services service which allows users to have an enhanced perception of the real world through a composition of virtual and actual objects. In recent years, AR has received tremendous attention from both academic and industry sectors. However, developers and end users are still suffering from lack of standard formats and protocols. We believe the obstacles stopping AR from flourishing are partially inherited from context-aware services and partially stem from the architecture of the current AR applications. Here, we aimed to develop a new model that can support AR framework for sharing Content between AR applications and communication between AR users. By incorporating Web 2.0 standards in Client-server architecture, we designed a new architecture for AR named Client Federated Servers (CFS). We implemented an AR application named Scratcher as a proof of concept. Scratcher allows users to search and share Targets as well as communicate with each other.augmented realitycontext-awarevirtua

Kamerabasierte Egomotion-Bestimmung mit natürlichen Merkmalen zur Unterstützung von Augmented-Reality-Systemen

In dieser Arbeit werden Verfahren zur Eigenbewegungsschätzung mit Stereokamerasystemen und Tiefenbildkameras untersucht. Der erste Teil beschäftigt sich mit Merkmalsextraktion und -Verfolgung in Bildsequenzen zum Gebrauch in Augmented-Reality-Anwendungen. Im zweiten Teil werden Anwendungsgebiete und Verfahren aus dem Bereich der Stereo-Egomotion analysiert und ein eigener Ansatz, der sowohl mit Stereobildsequenzen als auch mit Tiefenbildsequenzen zurechtkommt, vorgestellt

A STUDY OF THE APPLICATION OF AUGMENTED REALITY TECHNOLOGY ON 3-AXIS CNC IN SITU MACHINING SIMULATION

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH