The National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Science Nation has featured the work of Mississippi State University computer scientist J. Edward Swan II today, describing how his efforts to improve depth perception are critical to future military and medical applications of augmented reality:
Sports fans have come to expect some of the extras they see on their TV screen, such as the yellow lines that appear on a football field highlighting where the ball needs to go for a first down. Similarly, NASCAR fans can find their favorite driver in the pack because of those superimposed car numbers on the screen.
“Anyone who’s seen a football game has seen the virtual first-down line and it looks like it’s really something painted on the field. It’s a very compelling graphic. It really looks like it’s there,” says computer scientist J. Edward Swan, II.
But most people are probably not familiar with the technology that makes this all happen.
Augmented reality, or “AR,” is used to superimpose computer-generated virtual objects on our view of the real world.
With support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Swan and his team at Mississippi State University (MSU) are working to improve depth perception in the augmented reality environment.
“Ed Swan’s work on perceptual issues for AR goes back more than a decade and includes co-authoring a seminal paper in which computer graphics attributes were shown to be effective in providing a sense of the depth of occluded objects for mobile AR using a heads-up display,” explains Lawrence Rosenblum, program officer for graphics and visualization within the NSF Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering. “As AR continues to develop, with many of the ideas for mobile AR now being ported to PDAs and improved hardware for medical and other relatively stationary applications, his ongoing AR perception research is paving the pathway for working AR systems.”
Check out the NSF Science Nation video after the jump…
…and see the full story here.
(Contributed by Erwin Gianchandani, CCC Director)
