Augmented reality

Augmented Reality (AR) aims at merging the real and the virtual in order to enrich a real environment with virtual information. Augmentations range from simple text annotations accompanying real objects to virtual mimics of real-life objects inserted into a real environment. In the latter case the ultimate goal is to make it impossible to differentiate between real and virtual objects. Several problems need to be overcome before realizing this goal. Amongst them are the rigid registration of virtual objects into the real environment, the problem of mutual occlusion of real and virtual objects and the extraction of the illumination distribution of the real environment in order to render the virtual objects with this illumination model. This section will unfold how we proceeded to implement an Augmented Reality System that registers virtual objects into a totally uncalibrated video sequence of a real environment that may contain some moving parts. More details on this work can be found in [24].