Augmented Reality Prototypingby

Anders Lindström

Further Development

With the findings we made during the Megaski project I took upon myself to fur-ther develop the idea, in order to prove the agumentet reality goggles concept.

My research how this could be done led me to the usage of an arduino unit with two sensors. One compass Sensor and one Accelerometer. With those to sensors you can find out in what direction the wearer of the gog-gles are looking.

It is worth mentioning that I didn’t con-nected the goggles to any actual GPS unit, that would have been necessary for the goggles to work as intended. But, my research led me to the Galileo GPS pro-ject, which will have the precision needed for a project like this.

With accurate GPS data that tells where the goggles are in a 3d space, combined with sensors that gives data about the direction of where the goggles are ‘looking’, it would be pos-sible to project graphics that merge with the reality with out the need of a fixed position for the user or tracking points or markers to track where the graphics should be projected. This could therefore lead to a ‘true’ aug-mented reality experience.

I will over the next pages describe my prototyping.

Navigation

The goggles receive the GPS signal. With that data the goggles can calculate where in the 3d space the goggles are. I.e it cal-culates the X,Y and Z values for the gog-gles. But what it doesn’t know is in which direction the goggles are ‘looking’.

With the help of sensors that calculate the heading and the local X,Y and Z rotation values, the goggles will now know not only which point on the globe it is located but also where the user is looking.

Prototyping

The first thing I needed to do was to figure out a way to show the sensor data in a useful way. Since I had a compass giving data (picture 1) about the heading and an accelerometer (picture 1), I could tell where in which direction the goggles where ‘looking’.

I decided to use LED lamps to give basic information of the direction. On the side of the goggles, which I first designed and cut out in acrylics, I put 3 LED lamps that would give informa-tion of the tilt of the goggles (image 2). On top of the goggles I put 5 LED lamps (image 3), that would give indication about which heading the goggles had. I connected the sensors and lamps to an arduino board. This way I could visualize the data from the sensors with out the need of using a screen or graphics projections.

If we first dig deeper into the side LED lamps function. I programmed them so when the goggles where tilted down the lower green (grass or ground colour) LED would lit. When having the goggles lev-elled the middle white (neutral colour) LED will lit. When tilted up, the top blue (sky colour) LED will lit.

For the 5 LEDs showing data from the compass, I decided that the middle, a blue LED, would lit if the heading was 0 (i.e north). The two LEDs next to the middle one would lit if i was either looking at 10 or for the other lamp 350. and for the 2 lamps outside them the would lit at 20 respectively at 340.

I will on the next page show an illustration how it looks like when these lights are lit on different positions.

1.

2.

3.

2.

How it works

The side image of the goggles shows what happens to the lights when the gog-gles are tilted up and down.

The images sequence below shows the goggles from a top view, and what happens when you turn your had ac-cording to the values describe on the previous page.

0 deg 350 deg 340 deg

Down

Leveled

Up

Conclusion

The prototyping gave me a better under-stand how I could be able to achive a full augumented reality experience. I will continue to look into this project.

My next step is to get hold of a pair of ‘see through augmented reality goggles’ and project graphics that is produced by a game engine.

The GPS data will have to wait. If I test the goggles in a fixed eniviroment I can use regular motion capture equipment to track the goggles position. It will be interesting to see where this project will lead me.