PDA Augmented Reality

This time I chose to read an article that discussed augmented reality acting on a handheld device to see the challenges and overall performance issues.  This article was posted in 2003, so the hardware that was available then as compared to today is much more limited.  Still, the authors decided to make use of a PocketPC for its comparably advanced hardware of the time, with a 400MHz processor; a 240x320 16-bits display; 64MB RAM; 802.11b wireless network interface; as well as a camera addon with 320x240 color resolution.  Compare this to the hardware available in the Nexus One phone, which boasts a 1 GHz processor, has a GPU processor, 480 x 800 pixels 16M color display, 2560х1920 pixels camera with geotagging ability.

In the paper, the authors used a hybrid tracking system that utilized ARToolKit as a foundation.  The hybrid system comes from allowing the PDA to act as a standalone computation device, which can work autonomously, as well as allowing a PC connected wirelessly to shoulder the expensive tracking computation and thus increase overall performance.  The PDA was given SoftGL for drawing, which is a light version of OpenGL.  Due to the limitations of the PDA being unable to utilize floating points, which OpenGL relies on quite extensively, there were slight performance losses due to translations between integers and floats.  Overall, the PDA + camera addon were able to achieve performance of approximately 5 fps when utilizing a supporting PC for computations, and otherwise 2.5-3.5 fps.  This is promising for our project, as it demonstrates that even hardware that is not meant to handle augmented reality and has comparatively limited computing limitations can achieve modest results.


Source:
Daniel Wagner; Dieter Schmalstieg; “First Steps Towards Handheld Augmented Reality,” Vienna University of Technology, Favoritenstr.
http://www.icg.tu-graz.ac.at/Members/daniel/Publications/HandheldAR_ISWC03final.pdf