Authors:
Kikuo Asai
1
and
Hideaki Kobayashi
2
Affiliations:
1
National Institute of Multimedia Education, Japan
;
2
The Graduate University for Advanced Studies, Japan
Keyword(s):
Augmented reality, Web browser, two-layer display, content presentation, and character recognition.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Multimedia and User Interfaces
;
Web Information Systems and Technologies
;
Web Interfaces and Applications
Abstract:
We developed a prototype system to make an augmented reality (AR) environment using a Web browser. Although AR technology has the potential to be used in various applications, authoring/editing AR contents is a problem on the wide spread. Graphics expertise and knowledge of computer programming are necessary for creating contents for AR applications. We used a Web browser as a presentation tool so that users who had experience in creating Web contents could reuse the multimedia data as AR contents and modify the AR contents by themselves. A two-layer display was used in the system in order to superimpose virtual objects onto a real scene for creating an AR environment. Another problem is about identifying objects in the real scene. An open-source library, ARToolkit, is often used as an image-processing tool for detecting the position and orientation of markers as well as identifying them. However, the markers must be registered in the system in advance, and the registration becomes t
edious work when many markers are used such as Japanese kanji characters. The optical character reader (OCR) middleware was implemented as a character-recognition function for Japanese character markers. This paper describes the system design and software architecture for constructing an AR environment using a Web browser display and the demonstration of the prototype system.
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