dinate system if at least two cameras can detect the
same marker (Zhang, 2000). A rigid body registered
by the tracking system, can be tracked by means of
the fixed known distances between its markers.
In many MR applications, devices like head
mounted displays, stereo glasses or interaction de-
vices, e.g., gloves or wands, have to be tracked (Bow-
man et al., 2004). Often these devices do not require
more than three, four or five markers, arranged in a
target attached to such a device. For instance, a typi-
cal setup in a co-located MR environment consists of
two users, each equipped with an interaction device
and stereo glasses each including approximately three
to five markers. However, some applications need
to track more complicated objects requiring a much
larger number of markers. This occurs, for example,
when tracking real objects having several markers at-
tached on different sides in order to avoid occlusions.
Usually, rigid bodies are defined by the developer
or an interaction device designer by arranging mark-
ers around the object respectively device to be tracked
(Davis et al., 2004). When arranging markers on such
an object it is essential to arrange them in such a way
that the distances between all markers are pairwise
different if possible. Otherwise the tracking system
may mistake distances and the corresponding device
will not be recognized. For each new marker to be
integrated into a configuration consisting of n mark-
ers n new distances have to be considered. For ex-
ample, when building a simple target including three
markers, adding a fourth marker requires the designer
to consider three new distances. Moving one marker
in a configuration of four markers may change three
distances that have to be pairwise different and differ-
ent from each of the distances of the remaining three
markers. Thus, although finding a well-defined con-
figuration seems to be simple it involves a non-trivial
task of arranging the markers especially if several de-
vices with numerous markers are included.
However, when constructing a target usually the
markers are arranged by trial-and-error. After a pro-
totype rigid body has been built, the application de-
veloper or user has to test the corresponding device in
a laboratory setup. If the test shows bad rigid body
performance, the designer has to rebuild the device.
A bad rigid body performance means that the device
is often not tracked or it is tracked with position or
orientation errors which do not result from accuracy
errors of the used tracking system; these mistakes re-
sult from confusing distances within the same config-
uration or between different configurations.
After several iterations of building, testing and re-
defining, the designer may have constructed a con-
figuration that provides sufficient tracking properties.
However, even when ready-made targets are tracked
well, it is not ensured that the corresponding arrange-
ments of markers are optimal in terms of reliability
and robustness and if it is possible to add further tar-
gets to the setup that are distinguishable from the al-
ready designed ones. Typically, targets built via such
a procedure consist of distances which have the po-
tential to disturb the tracking process. For instance,
distances within the same target or distances of dif-
ferent targets used for the interaction may be equal.
In order to support the arrangement of markers in
a target we present a procedure to semi-automatically
generate marker-based rigid bodies in an iterative
way. When using our approach the proposed con-
figurations are adapted to the properties of the corre-
sponding tracking system, e.g., granularity, accuracy,
jitter etc., and thus the described concepts enhance the
tracking process. Our procedure allows to generate
rigid bodies for several devices associated with an ar-
bitrary set of markers. This paper describes the tech-
nical background of our approach and the results of an
evaluation comparing commercially available devices
with their associated targets to rigid bodies proposed
by our approach.
The remainder of this paper is structured as fol-
lows. Section 2 outlines the concepts of optical track-
ing and explains how 3D points are generated from
2D images of point-based markers grabbed with at
least two cameras. In Section 3 we describe how rigid
bodies are defined and how the detection of a config-
uration is performed by the tracking system. Section
4 explains our algorithm to generate configurations
semi-automatically in an iterative way. In Section 5
we present an evaluation of our concept and show how
we could increase the performance of the devices by
redefining two example targets. Section 6 concludes
the paper and gives an overview about future research
directions.
2 INFRARED-BASED OPTICAL
TRACKING
Since the brightness of most MR systems, e.g.,
CAVEs, PowerWalls, etc., is relatively limited, many
projection-based environments require a significant
reduction of the ambient light. To overcome the re-
sulting lighting problem for the cameras, an infrared
(IR) optical tracking systems illuminates the scene us-
ing infrared light, and IR pass filters are attached to
the lenses of the tracking system’s cameras. Infrared
optical tracking systems aim at measuring the (real-
world) positions of numerous markers in the envi-
ronment. Since active markers such as light-emitting
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