A futuristic-looking Head Mounted Projection Display (yes, it really does work).
Image courtesy of ODALab, Prof. Jannick Rolland.
This week I attended the International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR) conference in Orlando. This is an annual conference that circles the globe every three years, from the U.S. to Asia to Europe. Next year it will be held in Seoul. It started life as an IEEE workshop in 1998, maturing to a full conference in 2002. In a year when any other conference I’ve been to was down 30% in attendance, ISMAR’s attendance doubled to 400, about the size of the upcoming International Optics Design Conference (IODC 2010) in Jackson Hole, WY in early June (couldn’t pass up the opportunity to plug IODC).
This year for the first time ISMAR attempted, with some success, to mix science and art. Nearly one-third of the conference agenda was led by educators, performers, and authors. While in general each group stayed on their own side of the hall, every now and then someone would find themselves in the “wrong” session. In my case, this happened yesterday. The speaker, a poet, was running down some recent works developed for augmented reality. Who knew? I found it to be a fascinating topic, well outside of my box. In most cases, these are video format pieces that are meant to be experienced with a head-worn display (HWD), the latest terminology for this technology. Which of course does not happen to exist, and therefore this art form is currently experienced though the screen of an iPod. This is almost embarrassing to those of us who have been working diligently for over a decade to bring a personal HWD to a store near you. In the piece that is the easiest to describe, the “artist” introduces you to “video archeology.” You are given a map, a video, and an iPod customized to know where it is via GPS. As you pass over key points on the map, the iPod displays video content created earlier, elsewhere, of events that took place at a location going back in time. I found this to be a very exciting concept. There were a number of other pieces that were more abstract, but nonetheless begin to show how transformational augmented and virtual reality is likely to be.
It was somewhat by coincidence that the talk I gave at the OSA Annual Meeting the week before, in San Jose, was on the technology of head-worn displays. Coauthored with my wife, Prof. Jannick Rolland of the Institute of Optics at the University of Rochester (and formerly of CREOL), this paper reviewed some current technologies that are being pursued to result in a viable personal display. The presentation used at both OSA and at a workshop at ISMAR can be downloaded here.* In addition, there is an excellent overview article on personal displays in particular, authored by Dr. Ozan Cakmakci, the most recent addition to ORA’s Engineering Services Group, and Prof. Rolland, his advisor, in the April 2009 issue of Optics and Photonics News.
* I wasn’t on the ISMAR agenda, but since I had the material I sat in on a panel. It probably didn’t hurt that Prof. Rolland was the conference co-chair.
Ozan Cakmakci, who recently joined ORA’s Optical Engineering Group, sporting the latest in augmented reality eyewear. Image courtesy of ODALab, Prof. Jannick Rolland.
The look of the current generation of prototype see-through displays,
clockwise from the upper left: Lumus, Sony, ODALab, ORA.
Interesting Links
- International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality 2009: http://www.ismar09.org/
- Optical Diagnostics & Applications Laboratory (ODALab): http://www.odalab-spectrum.org/
- OSA presentation, “The Coming Generation of Head-Worn Displays (HWDs): Will the Future Come to Us through New Eyes?”