Section: Scientific Foundations

Augmented Environments

Participants : Audrey Colbrant, Yohan Lasorsa, Jacques Lemordant, David Liodenot, Mathieu Razafimahazo.

The term Augmented Environments refers collectively to ubiquitous computing, context-aware computing, and intelligent environments. The goal of our research on these environments is to introduce personal Augmented Reality (AR) devices, taking advantage of their embedded sensors. We believe that personal AR devices such as mobile phones will play a central role in augmented environments. These environments offer the possibility of using ubiquitous computation, communication, and sensing to enable the presentation of context-sensitive information and services to the user.

Augmented reality applications often rely on 3D content and employ specialized hardware and computer vision techniques for both tracking and scene reconstruction. Our approach tries to seek a balance between these traditional AR contexts and what has come to be known as mobile AR browsing. It first acknowledges that mobile augmented environment browsing does not require that 3D content be the primary means of authoring. It provides instead a method for HTML5 and audio content to be authored, positioned in the surrounding environments and manipulated as freely as in modern web browsers.

Many service providers of augmented environments desire to create innovative services. Accessibility of buildings is one example we are involved in. However, service providers often have to strongly rely on experience, intuition, and tacit knowledge due to lack of tools on which to base a scientific approach. Augmented environments offer the required rigorous approach that enables the creation of Evidence-Based Services (EBS) if adequate tools for AR technologies are designed. Service cooperation through exchange of normalized real-time data or data logs is one of these tools, together with sensor data streams fusion inside an AR mobile browser. EBS can improve the performance of real-world sensing, and conversely EBS models authoring and service operation can be facilitated by real-world sensing.

The applications we use to elaborate and validate our concepts are pedestrian navigation for visually impaired people and applications for cultural heritage visits. On the authoring side, we are interested in interactive indoor modeling, audio mobile mixing, and formats for Points of Interest. Augmented environment services we consider are, among others, behavior analysis for accessibility, location services, and indoor geographical information services.