Real World Object Annotation for See-Through Displays

A tremendous growth of the Internet over the past years together with the growing availability of wireless communication technologies in the wide, local and personal area, and the maturing of miniaturized Internet hardware technologies like tiny web servers has fertilized the emergence of “smart appliances”: wirelessly ad-hoc networked, mobile, autonomous special purpose computing devices, providing largely invisible support and services to users. Such smart appliances, usually operated under intuitive, rather implicit user interaction – i.e. they interact with their environment via a variety of sensor on the input side, and a vast of actuators on the output side – have started to populate the “real world” with “hidden” or “invisible” services, thus building up an “invisible world” of services associated with real world objects. With the embedding of invisible technology into everyday things, however, also the intuitive perception of “invisible services” disappears. We believe it has potential advantages to support the perception of smart appliance services via novel interactive visual experiences. We have developed and built DigiScope, a see-through based visual perception system for “invisible worlds” to support interactive theater experience in mixed reality spaces. In a case study, we demonstrate the use of DigiScope to percept the “invisible services” of a smart appliance which we have developed: SmartCase – a multisensor, wireless, embedded “carry-on” Internet appliance.