Augmented reality in a wide area sentient environment

Augmented reality (AR) both exposes and supplements the user's view of the real world. Previous AR work has focussed on the close registration of real and virtual objects, which requires very accurate real-time estimates of head position and orientation. Most of these systems have been tethered and restricted to small volumes. In contrast, we have chosen to concentrate on allowing the AR user to roam freely within an entire building. At AT&T Laboratories Cambridge we provide personnel with AR services using data from an ultrasonic tracking system, called the Bat system, which has been deployed building-wide. We have approached the challenge of implementing a wide-area, in-building AR system in two different ways. The first uses a head-mounted display connected to a laptop, which combines sparse position measurements from the Bat system with more frequent rotational information from an inertial tracker to render annotations and virtual objects that relate to or coexist with the real world. The second uses a PDA to provide a convenient portal with which the user can quickly view the augmented world. These systems can be used to annotate the world in a more-or-less seamless way, allowing a richer interaction with both real and virtual objects.