Our goal is to enhance human vision with computer-generated graphics; a user interface paradigm called Augmented Reality.

Why should you care about Augmented Reality? Recently, a rapidly increasing number (see Google Trends) of researchers, artists, and companies are investigating Augmented Reality. They all share the vision that Augmented Reality will be the next big user interface revolution since the invention of the Graphical User Interface in the 1970s.

How can you find out more about Augmented Reality? Good starting points are the Wikipedia article and Gamesalfresco.

Mobile Augmented Reality

Most of today's mobile internet devices contain facilities to search the user's immediate environment. The search results are then displayed on a map. Several research projects have aimed to provide more intuitive displays by using augmented reality to overlay points of interest on a video image of the real world.

Although this display is more intuitive, it introduces new challenges; how to display points of interest that are: 1) outside of the user's field of view, or 2) occluded by real-world objects? Below, you can see three examples of how we address these challenges. XrayVision and MeltVision enable users to explore occluded points of interest. DistortVision enables users to explore points of interest that are outside their field of view.

XrayVision

MeltVision

DistortVision

Visuo-Haptic Augmented Reality

Human perception is multi-modal: the senses of touch and vision do not operate in isolation, but rather closely coupled. This observation has inspired systems that allow users to see and touch virtual objects at the same location in space. The movie on the right shows one of our systems, which allows users to see and touch a virtual car. Using a head-worn display, the user can see the virtual car (the small inset on the bottom right of the movie shows the user's view). The user can also feel the car with his right hand through a haptic device called Phantom.