ACM TechNews

'Virtuality' Gets Real

ICT Results (08/12/08)

The European Union-funded IMPROVE project has developed a series of hardware and software innovations that combined provide a complete platform for virtual and augmented reality. "We worked on head-mounted displays [HMDs], improved tiled displays, rendering and streaming software, color calibration techniques, collaboration and networking, and novel interaction systems," says IMPROVE coordinator Pedro Santos. The initiative produced three prototype HMDs offering good resolution, including a handheld model to be presented at ACM SIGGRAPH that Santos says can obstruct daylight so that sunlight does not wash out the image. The platform's rendering software uses images from high-dynamic range cameras to calculate realistic shadows, reflections, and light-intensity levels so that a model can be accurately visualized from any direction in real time. IMPROVE's video-streaming technology enables high-quality stereoscopic streaming across a mobile network, while the project's marker and marker-less tracking systems are another notable breakthrough. The marker tracking system utilizes reflective markers to compute the position of real objects in a fixed reference frame, allowing the system to precisely plot an object's shape. Santos says the marker-less tracking system involves the detection of feature points in real scenes and the comparison of current images from a camera to calibrated reference images of the same scene in order to calculate a user's present position. Other IMPROVE innovations include interaction systems that support collaborative design and multi-modal, multi-user interaction, and a color-calibration method to ensure the faithful rendering of colors by tiled banks of high-definition screens.

http://cordis.europa.eu/ictresults/index.cfm/section/news/tpl/article/id/89962

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