Viz wear: Toward human-centered interaction through wearable vision and visualization

Abstract

In this paper, we discuss the development of wearable systems which we collectively term VizWear. Vision plays an important role in both people’s and computers’ understanding of contextual information, and the use of augmented reality (AR) techniques is a good way to show information intuitively. This is the basis of our research on wearable computer vision and visualization systems. Our wearable systems enable us to run different vision tasks in real-time. We describe a novel approach not only to sensing the wearer’s position and direction, but also to displaying video frames overlaid with 2-D annotations related to the wearer’s view. We have also developed a method for 3-D graphical overlay by applying object recognition techniques and the Hand Mouse. which enables the wearer to interact directly with an AR environment. We also describe an efficient method of face registration using wearable active vision.