Date: Monday, November 5, 2001
Time: 4:00 PM (talk) 3:00 PM (reception at 246 EGRC)
Place: 313 EGRC, NCSU Centenial Campus (click for
courtesy parking request)
Speaker: Steven Feiner, Computer Science, Columbia University
Environment Management for Augmented Reality
Abstract: As computers grow ever smaller and faster, the option of wearing them, rather than carrying or sitting in front of them, is rapidly becoming a reality. One especially promising approach for wearable user interfaces is augmented reality in which the physical world is augmented with additional information. For example, a see-through, head-worn display can be used to overlay computer graphics on what the user normally sees.
This talk provides an overview of the work being done by Columbia's Computer Graphics and User Interfaces Laboratory to explore user interface design for collaborative mobile augmented reality systems. One issue that I will discuss is environment management, by which I mean the task of managing the presentation of a large number of virtual objects on many displays for many users. The use of see-through displays has a profound effect on the user interface, precisely because virtual objects appear in the same surrounding space as other users and physical objects. Thus, as a user's head moves, or anything visible through their see-through display moves, the user's combined view of the virtual and physical world also changes. For example, a static virtual object intended to be viewed next to a physical object may suddenly obscure or be obscured by it or other objects. To address these problems, we have developed a prototype environment management component that interactively manages the geometry of virtual objects to maintain desired viewplane relationships between them and other physical and virtual objects.
Short Bio: Steven Feiner is a Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University, where he directs the Computer Graphics and User Interfaces Laboratory. He received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Brown University in 1987. His research interests include virtual environments and augmented reality, knowledge-based design of graphics and multimedia, information visualization, wearable computing, and hypermedia. Prof. Feiner is coauthor of Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice (Addison-Wesley, 1990) and of Introduction to Computer Graphics (Addison-Wesley, 1993). He is an associate editor of ACM Transactions on Graphics, and serves on the executive boards of the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Visualization and Graphics, and the IEEE Computer Society Task Force on Human-Centered Information Systems, and is a member of the steering committees for the IEEE Symposium on Information Visualization, the IEEE and ACM International Symposium on Augmented Reality, and the IEEE Symposium on Wearable Computers. Over the past year, he has been general chair of IEEE Information Visualization 2001, symposium co-chair of the IEEE and ACM International Symposium on Augmented Reality 2001, and program co-chair of the International Symposium on Mixed Reality 2001. In 1991 he received an Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award.