Last week I hosted a workshop on Augmented Reality for the post-graduate students of Ravensbourne College. It was divided in three major parts; the definition of what is Augmented Reality and what is not, then the development of a couple of Augmented Reality applications based on the FLARManager software library and the last part was a brief examination of platform-specific Augmented Reality tools.
The workshop demos required only the Adobe Flash Builder, as the attendees had to bring their own laptops (Mac and PCs) and Adobe Flash is the only cross-platform Augmented Reality solution development-wise.
During the last academic year in the course MA Interactive Digital Media of Ravensbourne College I discovered my interest in innovative applications for museums, while at the same time I had the chance to explore a plethora of new technologies. After long hours of research and practise as well (i.e. programming, design and user testing) I found my exact subject of interest, which is Augmented Reality iPhone applications for museums and dedicated myself to it ever since. The video below is a demonstration of the largest part of my work.
For the installation of my project at the MA Major Project Exhibition which took place on the 12-16th of July at Ravensbourne College, I designed the following poster which summarises the concept and the functionality behind the prototype applications of the Augmented Reality Suite.
Now I am working on my dissertation which is a documentation of my major project and of the research that supported its concept and implementation. The approximately 10,000 words long essay will be uploaded here by September.
The previous post was an introduction to Augmented Reality explaining the basic terminology and the techniques while this one is focusing on applications of this technology that have been hosted or are still running in cultural institutions all over the world. To my surprise I found about 10 projects, the majority of which were either experimental or for seasonal exhibitions, while there are also some exceptional cases of projects which are still hosted in museums. The projects are sorted by time beginnning with the oldest one.
When I found this project I was actually amazed, because it clearly got the success factor for me: Not only it used state of the art technologies, like multi-touch tables and augmented reality, but it also made the best out of them, with a proper scenario and interaction design. For the complete journey visit the project’s site and click on the thumbnails to watch the videos.
The Seattle Art Museum and the University of Washington Human Interface Technology Laboratory recently completed a year-long collaboration to create a virtual archeological dig. The Virtual Dig ran from May 10, 2001, to August 12, 2001 as part of the Sichuan China artifact exhibit. During that time more than 25,000 people experienced this novel interactive experience.
The Virtual Dig combined HI-SPACE and ARToolKit interaction technologies along with 10 networked computers, 6 cameras, and 6 projectors. This page focuses on the interactions supported by the technologies. Each interaction is labeled as HI-SPACE or ARToolKit to identify which technology supported the specific interaction.
As a project it was more of a game, to increase attraction to cultural heritage institutions, offering a deeply engaging experience. Thus, it did not provide any additional material or information about the artefacts exhibited or about their context.
Very interesting concept and implementation to offer a museum visit online using three-dimensional graphics allowing the viewers to interact with the exhibits, however I do not think I would use this project more than once. For me most of those projects which show a virtual world, instead of making me feel thrilled like I was in there, they rather make me think “How much do I want to be there!!” feeling that what I experience using them, is a rather bad copy.
This project was running from 2002 to 2009 in the Deutsche Museum in Bonn, Germany. It uses optical-see through display to augment virtual objects in the real world, while with a large ring all around the users are able to rotate the object as it would happen with a real showcase. It is an exceptional AR project as it is both educational and viable as it has been used for years on a permanent exhibition.
We describe the Interactive Virtual Showcase, which was developed for the interactive presentation of mixed reality scenarios in museums. We suggest a rugged design and an intuitive interaction metaphor, which is based on a tangible interface. The system was installed at a museum and is running for more than one year without major problems. The reaction of the numerous museum visitors has been very positive, which is partially due to the fact that the technology is mostly hidden from the users.
That is the kind of projects I admire, those which are not only exceptional both in conceptual and in practical level, but are also implemented in a way that they will be viable and sustainable to serve a museum in the long-term.
This is another project which surprised me but for different reasons. I am not aware if it was ever hosted in the museum it is made for, but it is very interesting both the number as well as the quality of the applications which constitute this project. Throughout his website Kolsouzoglou’s research and experimentation around Augmented Reality and Augmented Virtuality can be found. A summarising essay is available here here.
Well, I did not spend a long time on that rather experimental project since all the concepts implemented there had occurred to me before so I was just stunned by the amount of work and effort using special equipment and cutting-edge technologies.
This one is a professional project done by the Louvre – DNP Museum Lab for Louvre and was actually running on a seasonal exhibition there on Islamic art. The technology used is a commercial product of Metaio named Unifeye SDK. The Tour Guide hosted information for the artefacts and also directions helping users to find their way in the exhibition. In addition to the actual AR Tour Guide, the Lab ran a survey and evaluation on the project’s efficiency.
Recent years have seen advances in many enabling Augmented Reality technologies. Furthermore, much research has been carried out on how Augmented Reality can be used to enhance existing applications. This paper describes our experiences with an AR-museum guide that combines some of the latest technologies. Amongst other technologies, markerless tracking, hybrid tracking, and an Ultra-Mobile-PC were used. Like existing audio guides, the AR-guide can be used by any museum visitor, during a six-month exhibition on Islamic art. We provide a detailed description of the museum’s motivation for using AR, of our experiences in developing the system, and the initial results of user surveys. Taking this information into account, we can derive possible system improvements.
A polished Augmented Reality application which shows the future of this technology in cultural institutions. The evaluation and the findings accompanying the project are also of much use. For me, however, the fact that it lasted for a seasonal exhibition only proves a possible weakness regarding sustainability. A last point, is that the project’s cost is rather high both hardware-wise (Ultra-Mobile PCs) and software-wise (Metaio license).
In the same sense with the previous project is the AR Guide for the Museum of Fine Arts in Rennes, France. Includes an Ultra-Mobile PC while for the paintings’ recognition ARToolkitPlus has been used. It also used a framework called MAGIC standing for Mobile Augmented Reality for Indoor Collections, which unfortunately cannot be found online. The concept here is that they did use marker-based tracking, but as markers they used the paintings themselves, avoiding any intervention to the actual exhibition.
Can Augmented Reality (AR) techniques inform the design and implementation of a mobile multimedia guide for the museum setting? Drawing from our experience both on previous mobile museum guides projects and in AR technology, we present a fully functional prototype of an AR-enabled mobile multimedia museum guide, designed and implemented for the Museum of Fine Arts in Rennes, France. We report on the life cycle of the prototype and the methodology employed for the AR approach as well as on the selected mixed method evaluation process; finally, the first results emerging from quantitative evaluation are discussed, supported by evidence and findings from the qualitative part of the assessment process. We conclude with lessons learned during the full circle of conception, implementation, testing and assessment of the guide.
The interface is a bit appalling for me but anyway that is rather subjective. I like the innovation of using the painting as a marker itself, although the users had to stand far enough, so that the whole painting is in the camera’s view and can be recognised. Regarding the evaluation, indeed it is very important but if you have to dress your users like troops as shown below well, I think this fact on its own affects their behaviour.
That is another project which used marker-based tracking for Augmented Reality applications. It was an attempt to create a tool which allows museums’ experts to develop AR experiences. The first concept implemented involves a user holding a camera-equipped mobile device and a marker next to each artwork. When the camera captures the marker the mobile device displays content relevant to the particular artwork and plays an audio narration. In addition, if the user had chosen a special audio trail, she was then given a marker and when her marker was placed next to the marker of an exhibit, a custom audio narration was triggered regarding the artefact based on the user’s preferences.
The second concept implemented involved an artwork of Kurt Schwitters and an installation constituted by a table a projector and a camera. When the users put markers on the table, these objects would appear literally on the painting as a part of the collage.
This is a systematic approach for making the AR technology more accessible to museum experts constituted by an iterative process of three phases. I really like the fact that from the very early stage of design until the very end of production and testing, the researchers worked closely with museums experts to evaluate the viability and sustainability of the product.
This is only a subset of the Augmented Reality projects that had taken place in (or were designed for) cultural institutions all over the world and that is because the particular technology encounters almost a decade of its existence. However, it has been just a couple of years since Augmented Reality became a trend mostly because the tools which enabling this technology have become much more accessible than they were let us say four years ago, due to the phenomenal commercial success of smartphones.
It has been a while, since I am interested in Augmented Reality (AR) and by now I was exploring more its practical side experimenting with ARToolkit. Now, I decided to do a more theoretical research in an attempt to, firstly, clear up in my head what Augmented Reality, Augmented Virtuality (AV) and Mixed Reality (MR) are and then document important AR projects for museums. The latter, as this post became 1000 words long, is going to be the next post.
Augmented Reality is a term for a live direct or indirect view of a physical real-world environment whose elements are augmented by virtual computer-generated imagery.
Augmented Virtuality refers to the merging of real world objects into virtual worlds.
In other words: Mixed Reality is a superset of both Augmented Reality and Augmented Virtuality representing all the cases that the user sees real and digital objects co-existing; Augmented Reality is when the user sees as a background the real world with digital objects superimposed and Augmented Virtuality is the reverse situation when the viewer sees a virtual world with some real objects in it. I must admit, when I cleared those terms in my mind, I felt better, like Kyle from Southpark I said to myself “You see, I’ve learned something today!” The subject of this post however is Augmented Reality alone.
With the definitions given above Augmented Reality can also be considered any application that uses the camera feed as its background. In most cases, though, when Augmented Reality is referred, it is meant that the superimposed graphics and they way they appear depend on the tracking, the localisation of the position and orientation of real physical objects. For example, in the Figure 1, the green creature appears always on top of the black square card. If that card, a real world object, is moved or rotated, so will also do the creature. There are several tracking techniques but in this post we will focus on the two most popular approaches the Marker-based and the GPS/Compass tracking.
The superimposed graphics are designed according to that coordinate system thus every move of the marker affects subsequently the graphics.
The main advantage of marker-based tracking is the accuracy as well as the stability in terms that, as long as the marker is clear in the camera’s view, the scene is solid and positioned precisely. Portability is another feature, as there is no need to make any changes on the software for changing the real-world environment. However one major disadvantage I faced with marker-based tracking is the flickering of the superimposed graphics when the marker is “face-on”. I did try for optimisation and work-arounds to avoid it but nothing worked; I just should not point at the marker directly.
The GPS/Compass tracking lacks in terms of accuracy as the GPS has ±10 meters precision as well as of stability because its functionality depends on the GPS-reception of the area it is used. However it has the major advantage of being marker-less and thus it can be applied without any intervention to the real-world.
Apart from the tracking method Augmented Reality applications are also categorised by the display they use, between the optical see-through and the video see-through displays. An optical see-through display employs half-silver mirror technology to allow views of physical world to pass through the lens and graphical overlay information to be reflected into the user’s eyes (Wikipedia, § Augmented Reality). An optical see-through display is usually part of a Head Mounted Display (HMD) a RoboCop like thing, which allows to whom it is wearing it, to see the real world through his or her glasses but with computer-generated graphics superimposed. The video see-through display is when the real world and the virtual world are shown in one single video stream. The Nearest Tube shown above as well as any other AR application for handheld devices uses a video see-through display i.e. the smartphone’s screen.
There is a plethora of free tools that can be used to develop AR applications and an extended list of them can be found in Wikipedia. Below there are some of the libraries suggested.
ARToolKit A Cross-platform Library for the creation of augmented reality applications, developed by Hirokazu Kato in 1999. It is maintained as an opensource project hosted on SourceForge and its newer versions since 2007 can be bought from ARToolWorks.
ATOMIC Authoring Tool A Cross-platform Authoring Tool software, which is a front-end for the ARToolKit library. Was developed for non-programmers, to create small and simple, Augmented Reality applications, released under the GNU GPL License.
OSGART A combination of ARToolKit and OpenSceneGraph.
SSTT Core Marker-based tracking which markers are coloured, without thick black border.
ARKit Open-Source Augmented Reality library for iPhone.
mixare – Open-Source (GPLv3) Augmented Reality Engine for Android. It works as a completely autonomous application and is available as well for the development of own implementations.
NyARToolkit – an ARToolkit class library released for virtual machines, particularly those which host Java, C# and Android.
AndAR – A native port of ARToolkit to the Android platform.
FLARToolKit An ActionScript 3 port of ARToolKit for Flash 9 and later.
SLARToolkit A Silverlight port of NyARToolkit.
Well, I did learn something today..like that Android is a particularly AR-friendly platform. The next post is going to be on Applications of Augmented Reality for Museums.