A Magnifying Glass Approach to Augmented Reality Systems

This paper proposes a novel way to realize augmented reality (AR) systems. Unlike previous AR systems, which use head-mounted or head-up displays, our approach employs a palmtop-sized video see-through device to present computer augmented view of the real world. This conguration, which w e call the magnifying glass approach, has several advantages over traditional head-up or head-mounted congurations. A user doesn't have t o p u t o n a n y c u m bersome head gear. Like a magnifying glass, the user can easily move the device around and compare real and augmented images. We h a ve built a prototype augmented reality system called NaviCam, based on the proposed magnifying glass approach. NaviCam uses a miniature gyro sensor to determine the orientation of device. It also has a vision-based ID recognition capability to detect a rough position of the device in the real world, and real world objects in front of the device. The experiment conducted by using NaviCam shows the great potential of the video see-through palmtop display. It was signicantly faster than the head-up congurations, and its subjective score was also higher.