Augmented Reality ─ Principles and Practice

Augmented Reality (AR) is one of today's fastest-growing areas of computer science and application development. AR overlays computer-generated information on views of the real world, amplifying human perception and cognition in remarkable new ways. (Ever see the virtual first down marker" in TV football games? That's AR -- and AR apps are rapidly coming to millions of smartphones, too.) Working in AR requires knowledge of recent advances in multiple fields, including computer vision, computer graphics, and HCI.

Augmented Reality: Principles and Practice integrates all this knowledge into one, single-source reference, presenting the most significant AR work with scrupulous accuracy. For more than a decade, Dieter Schmalstieg has pioneered both AR theory and application, and now, in this book with Tobias H. Hollerer, he addresses all aspects of the field, illuminating AR from both technical and HCI perspectives. The authors review AR's technical foundations, including display and tracking technologies; show how AR emerges from the symbiosis of computer vision and computer graphics, introduce AR-specific visualization and 3D interaction techniques, and showcase applications from diverse industries. They conclude by introducing AR smartphone development, including a cutting-edge Qualcomm QCAR case study.

This book will be an indispensable resource for everyone interested in AR, including software and apps developers, managers, students and instructors in the computing disciplines it requires, researchers, and hobbyists. For use in educational environments, the authors provide a companion website containing slides, code examples, and other source materials.

Dieter Schmalstieg is full professor and head of the Institute for Computer Graphics and Vision at Graz University of Technology (TUG), Austria. His current research interests are augmented reality, virtual reality, real-time graphics, 3D user interfaces, and visualization. He received Dipl.-Ing. (1993), Dr. techn. (1997) and Habilitation (2001) degrees from Vienna University of Technology. He is author and co-author of over 200 peer-reviewed scientific publications, associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, member of the editorial advisory board of computers & graphics and of Springer Virtual Reality, member of the steering committee of the IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality, chair of the EUROGRAPHICS working group on Virtual Environments (1999-2010), advisor of the K-Plus Competence Center for Virtual Reality and Visualization in Vienna and member of the Austrian Academy of Science. In 2002, he received the START career award presented by the Austrian Science Fund. In 2012, he received the IEEE Virtual Reality technical achievement award for seminal contributions to the field of Augmented Reality. Since 2008, he is also director of the Christian Doppler Laboratory for Handheld Augmented Reality.

Tobias Hollerer is Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he leads the Four Eyes Laboratory, conducting research in the four I's of Imaging, Interaction, and Innovative Interfaces. Dr. Hollerer holds a Diplom in informatics from the Technical University of Berlin as well as an MS and PhD in computer science from Columbia University. He is a recipient of the US National Science Foundation's CAREER award, for his work on "Anywhere Augmentation", enabling mobile computer users to place annotations in 3D space wherever they go. He has been named an ACM Distinguished Scientist in 2013. Dr. Hollerer is author of over 150 peer-reviewed journal and conference publications in the areas of augmented and virtual reality, information visualization, 3D displays and interaction, mobile and wearable computing, and social computing. Several of these publications have been selected for Best Paper or Honorable Mention awards at such venues as the IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR), IEEE Virtual Reality (VR), ACM Virtual Reality Software and Technology, ACM User Interface Software and Technology, ACM MobileHCI, IEEE SocialCom, and IEEE CogSIMA. Dr. Hollerer is an associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, and among his many organizational roles for scientific conferences he served as program chair for IEEE VR 2015, ICAT 2013, IEEE ISMAR 2010 and 2009, as general chair of IEEE ISMAR 2006, and as member of the steering committee of IEEE ISMAR.