Field
The present disclosure relates generally to motion tracking, and more particularly, to a method, system, and computer program product for motion tracking in connection with augmented reality systems, e.g., including a head mounted display (HMD).
Background
Recently there has been an explosion of interest in Augmented Reality well beyond the research community where the field was forged in the early years of the ISMAR conference and its prequels. The popular press has adopted wholesale the vision of the pioneering researchers, in which augmented reality (AR) will become an indispensable tool to augment human performance by providing enhanced situational awareness and visual guidance to complete tasks quickly and accurately without advance training.
For the past several years it seemed that the early focus on HMD-based AR had largely given way to tablet and phone AR because the devices became widely available to consumers and advertisers saw the novelty of simple video AR as a way to reach them. Wearable AR systems leave the user's hands free and can provide an always-on information display that is ready to provide augmentations quickly when they are needed.
This renewed interest in HMDs still faces challenges including optical technologies to produce small comfortable HMDs with sufficient field of view (FOV), and head-tracking that can produce convincing spatio-temporal registration of augmentations to their corresponding physical objects in unprepared real-world environments. Additional details can be found in Azuma, R., and Bishop, G., “Improving Static and Dynamic Registration in a See-Through HMD”, Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 37 '94. In Computer Graphics, Annual Conference Series, Orlando, Fla., pp. 197-204, 1994; Krevelen, D. W. F., & Poelman, R. A Survey of Augmented Reality Technologies, Applications and Limitations. The International Journal of Virtual Reality, 9(2):1-20, 2010; Daniel Wagner, Gerhard Reitmayr, Alessandro Mulloni, Tom Drummond, Dieter Schmalstieg. Pose tracking from natural features on mobile phones. Proceedings of the 7th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality, pages 125-134. ISMAR 2008; Welch, G., Bishop, G., Vicci, L., Brumback, S., Keller, K. & Colluci, D. (2001). High-Performance Wide-Area Optical Tracking: The HiBall Tracking System. Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments vol 10, issue 1, MIT Press; and Zhou, F., Been-Lirn Duh, Henry., Billinghurst, M. Trends in augmented reality tracking, interaction and display: A review of ten years of ISMAR. Proceedings of the 7th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality, Pages 193-202. ISMAR 2008; and Roberts, D., Menozzi, A., Cook, J., Sherrill, T., Snarski, S., Russler, P., . . . & Welch, G. Testing and evaluation of a wearable augmented reality system for natural outdoor environments. In SPIE defense, Security, and Sensing (pp. 87350A-87350A). International Society for Optics and Photonics. May 2013, the entire contents of each of which are incorporated herein by reference.
The ability to operate without markers has been demonstrated in many indoor and outdoor environments at impressive scale, and for video-see-through AR (such as tablets and phones) vision-based techniques also produce rock-solid registration with no noticeable swim or mis-registration. However optical see-through registration is a much harder problem because the view of the physical world cannot be delayed to match the view of the virtual augmentations, and the alignment cannot be simply matched up in a video image, which puts a much greater demand on absolute 6-DOF pose accuracy and relative calibration accuracy of the tracker to the display.
Thus, there remains need in the art for methods of achieving registration that appears “rock solid” with no noticeable “swim.”