Computer Vision Technology Propels Augmented Reality Forward

Imagine being able to access information about something just by looking at it.

The Telecommunications Research Center in Vienna has successfully demonstated the ability to do just that at an augmented reality conference in the French Alps. They linked a state-of-the-art eye tracker designed for Web analysis to a camera trained on a user's eye, another camera facing the user's scene and a smart phone with compass and GPS capabilities. Senors also were incorporated to follow the movement of the eye. Everything is attached to a bike helmet.

The smartphone tracks the user's orientation and location, and the sensors can determine that the user is looking at, say a building, a bridge or a monument. When the user closes his/her eyes for two seconds, it triggers a request for information about whatever was just in view.

A remotely accessed computer scans geo-referenced information on the Internet, such as Google Earth, and then forwards the result back to the user's cell phone in text-to-speech format.

The technology holds promise for all industries, especially military, security and retail.

A research team at the University of Tokyo also has adapted eye-tracking technology to be used as a memory aide.

Rather than training a camera on the eye, the "Aided Eye" system uses tiny infrared sensors mounted on a pair of eyeglasses.

The scope of this technology is more limited because instead of gathering information from the Internet, the team uses their own database of images and files.

In their experiment, the team entered 100 images into the database. When the eye affixed to an object, the computer was able to recognize the object and find it in the database. The team is still working out how to forward the information to the user -- a screen embedded inside the glasses' lens or an audio system are both options.