Research group for Media, Innovation and Contemporary Technologies

GiPA - Generic Platform for Augmented Reality Applications

About

Contemporary display devices – such as tablets, augmented reality (AR) glasses and wind-shield projection systems – offer the prospect of real-time overlaid rendering of computer-generated digital media material. This allows augmenting the perception of reality by virtually adding information about the user’s surroundings and virtual objects to interact with. As such, AR drives a new wave of interactivity that will benefit many markets and will cause disruptive changes in the way digital media are consumed:

  • large markets including (serious) gaming and broadcast entertainment
  • professional markets such as virtual prototyping, advertising and marketing
  • remote collaboration
  • smart city services
  • medical imaging
  • education
  • civil engineering
  • digital manufacturing

While these AR applications have their particular needs, they share a core set of requirements.  As such it makes sense to address in first instance these common requirements.

A new generation of AR applications is now feasible thanks to the convergence and advances of several essential AR technologies. For the user to experience a seamless overlay of the AR content on the real scene, AR applications rely on three major processes: acquisition and  recognition, tracking and rendering. These processes should be highly robust and accurate and introduce a bounded and predictable system response latency. As it is still not clear how these processes truly affect the user experience, quantifying the quality-of-experience of AR products is essential for improving AR applications. Interoperability between AR system components and with various application environments remains a concern, and research on de-sired properties of standards, which are currently immature.

These questions and  challenges also lead to the global challenge that will be addressed by GiPA, i.e., to propose an AR platform architecture that respects the common requirements of a wide range of applications, while ensuring a high degree of interoperability. Due to resource limitations it is not possible to address all these challenges in detail within GiPA. GiPA will rather address the following primary research challenges:

  1. 3D registration of natural scenes
  2. the analysis and interpretation of captured 3D scenes
  3. the efficient representation and  exchange of AR content
  4. the quantitative measurement of quality of experience

The industrial partners in the GiPA consortium will benefit from GiPA in terms of speed of market introduction and/or offered functionality. Moreover, GiPA would facilitate deploying similar solutions in other application domains.

Duration of the project

  • The project runs from  1/01/2014 -  31/12/2015

Staff involved

  • Dr. Elena Nuñez Castellar
  • Prof. dr. Jan van Looy

Financed by

  • iMinds