EmbeddedAR

From HIT Lab NZ

EmbeddedAR

Researchers:	Rob Ramsay , Michael Groufsky , Hartmut Seichter , Raphael Grasset
Date:	January 2009 - ongoing
Funding:

Recently there has been a great deal of movement within the smart phone market, with the advent of powerful new platforms such as the iPhone, Palm-Pre, and Android. The hardware these phones run on relies on a new generaton of increasingly powerful embedded processors and support chips. The EmbeddedAR project aims to use these new platforms to push the boundaries of what is currently possible within the field of of mobile and low power Augmented Reality.

Not merely writing software for constrained-processing environments, this project aims to show the new possibilities these systems allow, by leveraging both hardware, software, and firmware design.

Using powerful embedded processors, running flexible high-level OSes, advanced capabilities like networking and flexible multimedia processing can be easily implemented, while retaining the advantages of traditional embedded systems with high portability and long battery life.

The ability to integrate complex pre-existing resources into the final system, such as computer-vision libraries, is one of the key advantages of this project. Another is the ability to easily create small, custom-hardware, that more effectively satisfies a project's requirements.

We believe this project has exciting possibilities for cross collaboration with other areas within AR. Once robust development platforms are available that demonstrate what is possible, we believe that other researchers will see the possibilities these provide, resulting in projects that had not previously been considered feasible.

Developing AR demonstrations utilizing the new generation of low power, high MIPS embedded processors.
Developing custom hardware platforms to leverages these systems within unique domains.
Develop code optimized for these systems.

Our first effort has been the development of an AR library on the Beagle Board (based on ARToolKit and OpenGL ES 2.0).