Special Issue “Wearable Augmented and Mixed Reality Applications”

Sanna Sanna,De Pace De Pace,Manuri Manuri

doi:10.3390/info10100289

Sanna Sanna, De Pace De Pace + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/info10100289

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Journal: Information	Publication Date: Sep 20, 2019
Citations: 3	License type: CC BY 4.0

Affiliation: Polytechnic University of Turin

Abstract

Until some years ago, there was a lack of affordable devices that allowed for research in order to design and implement augmented and mixed reality applications. Thanks to technology improvements, it is now possible to find several wearable devices on the market that greatly improve the synergy between the real and virtual world, thus allowing users to be part of an immersive experience in which they can easily interact with 3D assets and real objects at the same time. Thus, the number of augmented reality and mixed reality (AR/MR) applications is greatly increased, from educational or cultural heritage applications to industry ones, such as maintenance-assembly-repair processes or product inspection and building monitoring. Indeed, several improvements have been made in order to enhance this technology, but some issues still need to be tackled, namely: limited field-of-view, tracking stability, the effectiveness of user interfaces to interact with 3D contents, and many others.

Highlights

This Special Issue proposes four papers that, by different approaches, attempt to tackle the above issues
Until some years ago, there was a lack of affordable devices that allowed for research in order to design and implement augmented and mixed reality applications
The first one compares a mobile device used as a controller with a control by gestures tracked by Microsoft Kinect

Summary

Introduction

This Special Issue proposes four papers that, by different approaches, attempt to tackle the above issues. The study presented in “On the Use of Mobile Devices as Controllers for First-Person Navigation in Public Installations” compares two different interaction modalities for navigating in large virtual environments, as follows: the first modality exploits a mobile device as a Information 2019, 10, 289; doi:10.3390/info10100289 www.mdpi.com/journal/information. On the other hand, unexperienced users preferred to employ motion gestures to navigate the virtual environments, proposing new intuitive solutions. 3. A Mobile Solution for Augmenting a Manufacturing Environment with User-Generated Annotations. Its intrinsic capability of adding virtual data in real space allows for acquiring information faster and more effectively than using paper-based annotations. The work presented in “A Mobile Solution for Augmenting a Manufacturing Environment with User-Generated Annotations” proposes a mobile markerless AR interface to interact with virtual annotations. Future developments will consider complex multiuser interactions, allowing different users to interact with the same virtual annotations

A Large Effective Touchscreen Using a Head-Mounted Projector

Review of the Augmented Reality Systems for Shoulder Rehabilitation