technotecture

Transitional space between real and augmented environment

Benchworks is a collaborative Augmented Reality application to facilitate in-situ and remote collaboration on urban design proposals. Two users can seamlessly integrate and observe virtual and real objects.

Implementation

BenchWorks combines optical tracking in form of the AR Toolkit and optional magnetic tracking. AR Toolkit provides an easy way to create input devices that do not rely on wires and therefore are more convenient in a multi-user setup. Magnetic tracking on the other hand provides higher precision for head orientation and in consequence provides more stable augmented vision. Thus, major benefits for this early prototype are combined: the precision of a magnetic tracking systems, the freedom of tangible interfaces and it overcomes the obstacle of occlusion within the scene. This has been changed later in the development to a huge multimarker setting. It is less stable (in terms of orientation measurement) but easier to integrate with existing hardware.

Features

• based on Lua bindings for TAP, ODE, AR ToolKit,
• rigid body simulation inside AR Environment
• realtime scenegraph syncing
• internal project webserver
• XML-RPC driven interlinking

Images

Correct occlusion of real and virtual objectsTUI camouflaged through a bucketPhysics Simulation in BenchWorks

Video

Video about BenchWorks

Research Outcome

Papers regarding Benchworks can be found here[1][2]

References