Convergence of context-awareness and augmented reality for ubiquitous services and immersive interactions

Abstract

Computing paradigm is moving toward context-aware and ubiquitous computing in which devices, software agents, and services are all expected to seamlessly integrate and cooperate in support of human objectives. Augmented reality (AR) can naturally complement ubiquitous computing by providing an intuitive and collaborative interface to a three-dimensional information space embedded within physical reality. This paper presents a framework and its applications for the convergence of context-awareness and augmented reality, which can support a rich set of ubiquitous services and immersive interactions. The framework provides a common data model for different types of context information from external sensors, applications and users. It also offers the software framework to acquire, interpret and disseminate context information. Further, it utilizes augmented reality for providing immersive interactions by embedding virtual models onto physical models, which realizes bi-augmentation between physical and virtual spaces. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.