The dust from CES 2009 has barely settled over many shiny new devices, and new advancements in Handheld Augmented Reality software are already emerging from Vienna.
Daniel Wagner and his team at Graz University have come up with new and improved capabilities.
High Speed Natural Feature Tracking on a mobile phone
We saw an early implementation of Studierstube ES at ISMAR 08, so I asked Daniel what’s new about this capability, besides being faster and more robust.
Daniel: We can now track multiple images and switch arbitrarily. I believe it is now at a level that it can really be used in practice.
Games alfresco: Looks great. Based on the video it seems that it runs on Windows Mobile 6 (ASUS p552w, iPAQ 614c). What about other platforms?
Daniel: Not bad! It is written in C/C++, [but] since this is pure math code, it could be ported easily to any platform. Our AR framework is still Windows Mobile only, although we now also have Linux support (desktop only since we lack a Linux phone). MacOS and Symbian are in the making and should be available in a month or so.
Tracking of Business Cards on a mobile phone
Daniel: On January 20th we have the official opening of our “Christian Doppler Lab” (founded by the Christian Doppler agency). For that purpose I created a small demo for tracking business cards. In the future we’ll replace the 3D content with something more useful…
I can’t talk about Daniel without mentioning WARM ’09; He is the main organizer of this Winter Augmented Reality Event on 12th-13th February 2009 at Graz University, Austria. Registration is over, but if you really want to go and have something cool to present – you may be able to convince Daniel to let you in.
Should you get your hands on this powerful technology (assuming Imagination makes it available for licensing soon) what would YOU do with it?
Filed under: AR Tracking | Tagged: ASUS p552w, Daniel Wagner, iPAQ 614c, Mobile AR, Studierstube ES, WARM 2009 |
Games Alfresco 
That looks like some excelent tracking there. Very impressive stuff.
Nice improvement over traditional markers, but I don’t agree that its pure natural feature tracking. It is a kind of general planar marker tracking.
It’s a very interesting subject I was looking around about more information but you got really what i was looking for in your article so thanks and keep it up you have a great blog , by the way Graz is a very lovely city I enjoyed it so much