The World as a User Interface: Augmented Reality for Ubiquitous Computing

Abstract

We discuss the possibilities of augmented reality (AR) as a ubiquitous user interface to the real world. A mobile AR system can constantly provide guidance to its user through visual annotation of the physical environment. The first part of the paper discusses the necessary ingredients for ubiquitous AR, on which we have worked in the recent past, namely mobile AR hardware, wide area tracking, unobtrusive user interfaces, application prototypes, and geographic data models suitable for AR. The second part of the paper examines future requirements of such data models in greater detail. Based on the lessons learned in our previous work, we identify shortcoming of existing standards for geographic information systems and visualization models. Ubiquitous AR requires independence of the data model from specific applications and their implicit assumptions. A semantic network model of geo-referenced data provides such a data model. We examine how such a model fits the requirements of AR applications, and how it can be implemented in practice.