Aug 25 2010
Researchers, Michele Zanin, Claudio Andreatta and Paul Chippendale at the “Technologies of Vision” Unit (TeV) in the Information Technology Centre of Fondazione Bruno Kessler (FBK) in Trento, Italy, have developed a prototype Marmota mobile Augmented Reality.
The main feature of Marmota is that it can identify and furnish details of the landscape including mountains, roads, hiking trails, rivers and lakes that is framed with a mobile phone and will draw these items onto the screen to highlight them.
According to Michele Zanin, the overall system encompasses technologies and discoveries from various disciplines such as spanning cartography, leading-edge computer graphic techniques and advanced machine vision algorithms. Once the image is framed by the user, the minimal amount of memory enables association of data such as altitude, latitude, longitude and distance from the observer with every pixel of the image. Then the device locates itself with a built-in GPS, followed by sending information via the Internet to the central Marmota server at FBK for processing. The processed information is transferred as a data package of about 50 to 120 kB to the device, and based on the priority rules the information is displayed as a high-resolution, 360-degree improved superimposed layer. The information provided to the user includes aspects that are actually visible from the observation point, excluding hidden ones thereby eliminating confusion.
Zanin also stated that the system allows acquiring information on points far from the eye up to 500 km away. It can be used throughout the world, from 60° latitude north to 60° south and can even sketch uneven variables. For further enhancement, this application will be tested in real-time situations at the Trento research centre, thus permitting to transform the current prototype into a version that can be used by the public.
Source: http://www.tev.fbk.eu