History of Augmented Reality Devices

The first AR system, which is also the first virtual reality system created by Ivan Sutherland. It uses an optical see-through head-mounted display that is tracked by either mechanical or ultrasonic 6DOF tracker. Could display very simple wireframe drawings in real time.

A Head-Mounted 3D Display1968

http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1476686

A hand-held device displaying spatially situated information. The output device consists of a 4" screen connected to a video camera through a cable. Device can be interacted with a few gestures and a single button. Chameleon's mobility was strongly limited due to the cabling.

Chameleon1993

http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=159566

The NaviCam device alike Chameleon uses a nearby powerful workstation, but uses a camera mounted on the mobile screen for optical tracking. Color-coded markers in the live camera image are detected by computer and context sensitive information is displayed directly on top of the video feed in a see-through manner.

NaviCam1995

http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=215639

Steve Feiner et al. present the first mobile augmented reality system (MARS), the Touring Machine. Main components are a see-through head-worn display (with orientation tracker); a backpack holding a computer, differential GPS, and digital radio for wireless web access; and a touchpad- and stylus-operated hand-held computer.

Touring Machine1997

S. Feiner, B. MacIntyre, T. Höllerer and A. Webster, “A touring machine: Prototyping 3D mobile augmented reality systems for exploring the urban

environment”, Proceedings of First IEEE International Symposium on Wearable Computers (ISWC '97), 1997, pp 74–81. Cambridge, MA.

Tobias Höllerer et al. present a MARS that allows indoor user to interact with the outdoor user with the help of desktop, AR tabletop, and head-worn VR. While outdoor users experience a first-person specialized multimedia presentation via a head-mounted display, indoor users can get an overview of the outdoor scene.

MARS1999

T. Höllerer, S. Feiner, T. Terauchi, G. Rashid and D. Hallaway, Exploring MARS: Developing indoor and outdoor user interfaces to a mobile augmented reality

system. Computers and Graphics, 1999, pp. 779–785.

An EyeTap is a device that is worn in front of the eye and which acts as a camera to record the scene available to the eye as well as a display to impose a computer-generated imagery on the original scene available to the eye.

EyeTap1999

http://www.eyetap.org/

BARS, the Battlefield Augmented Reality System. Consists of a wearable computer, a wireless network system and a see-through HMD. The system augments the view of a battlefield scene with additional information about environmental infrastructure, but also about possible enemy ambushes.

BARS2000

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.1.5064

mPARD uses analogue wireless video transmission to a host computer which takes the burden of computation off the mobile hardware platform with limited processing power. The rendered and augmented images are sent back to the visualization device over a separate analog channel.

mPARD2000

H. Regenbrecht and R. Specht, “A mobile Passive Augmented Reality Device”, Proceedings of the International Symposium on Augmented Reality (ISAR 2000),

2000, pp. 81-84.

PDA-based, wireless AR system. User’s position is localized by measuring the travel time of ultra-sonic pulses between specially built devices worn by the user and fixed receivers in the floors ceilings building-wide. The direction of the users view is estimated, and a model of the scene with additional information about the scene is rendered onto the PDA screen.

BatPortal2001

еJ. Newman, D. Ingram and A. Hopper, “Augmented Reality in a Wide Area Sentient Environment”, Proceedings of the 2nd IEEE and ACM International Symposium on Augmented Reality (ISAR 2001),

2001, pp. 77-86.

System for tracking 3D markers on a mobile phone by Mathias Möhring. A first video see-through augmented reality system on a consumer cell-phone that supports the detection and differentiation of different 3D markers, and correct integration of rendered 3D graphics into the live video stream.

Video See-Through AR2004

http://140.78.90.140/medien/ar/Pub/Cell_Phone_AR.pdf

A team at the University of Washington has created a contact lens assembled with functional circuitry and LEDs. Potential uses include virtual displays for pilots, video-game projections and telescopic vision for soldiers. The next steps are to build a version that can display several pixels.

Contact Lenses(prototype 2011)

http://spectrum.ieee.org/biomedical/bionics/augmented-reality-in-a-contact-lens/0/

This is Google's attempt to make wearable computing mainstream, and it's a smart pair of glasses with an integrated heads-up display and a battery hidden inside the frame. The intended purpose would be the hands free displaying of information from the Internet via language voice commands.

Project Glass2012

https://plus.google.com/111626127367496192147