Sony's Augment-able Reality System

In this great article I found a near exact replication of what we hope to achieve in our own project.  Written back in 1998, Sony developed a prototype AR system that allowed for digital content to be tagged in an environment either to virtual areas, or physical markers.

Sony designed a system comprised of a head-mounted system containing a monocular display screen, a camera, and an infrared sensor.  They coupled the headset with a wearable computer able to connect to the Internet.

Sony chose to use a wearable computer design because they believed it was the technology of the future, that it would become much more popular as the years went on.  Today the wearable computer is all but forgotten, and has instead been replaced by high-performing smart phones.

The team from Sony created a software system that allowed for the detection of physical contexts, such as rooms, and also to recognize physical markers such as black-and-white matrix codes.  Infrared beams emit codes on occasion that signal the identity of a room location.  This allows for the system to track its location on a floor map.  For specific objects, they created unique ID codes for physical objects such as a VCR.

As for what the head-up display showed the user, while the user is viewing the environment they will see a video overlay, with some additional information on what is available in a side pane such as what is available for viewing.  The user can also create content, either voice or images, to append to a location using drag-and-drop on the display.  The microphone is cleverly hidden inside the mini mouse.

Adding voice content to a location

While there are many similarities in the concept, the implementation between Sony and our design is suitably different.  For example, Sony uses IR light to detect a room location, and a high contrast ID matrix code.  We will be using a tracking system that relies on the ID matrix codes, images, and GPS location.  Additionally, while the filtering that they utilized is very similar to our idea (users can filter out content and establish privacy options) our work will additionally allow for collaboration of content that is lacking here.




Reference:
Rekimoto, J.; Ayatsuka, Y.; Hayashi, K.; , "Augment-able reality: situated communication through physical and digital spaces," Wearable Computers, 1998. Digest of Papers. Second International Symposium on , vol., no., pp.68-75, 19-20 Oct 1998
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=729531&isnumber=15725