Abstract

The thesis describes the development of the Spatial Context Ontology Reasoning Environment (SCORE), that supports the management of explicit and implicit spatial context for Augmented Reality applications.

Augmented Reality (AR) forms the link between reality and Virtual Reality by augmenting the user's environment with virtual objects and information, that can be interacted with. Here in general head-mounted displays are used to present the augmented view to the user.

This research field is investigated at the chair for Computer Aided Medical Procedures and Augmented Reality at the Technische Universität München. Among many other things it covers new user interaction paradigms, sensor analysis and the access to structured information in intelligent environments. A common claim to Augmented Reality systems is not to restrict the users' scope of motion. For supporting mobility the DWARF framework is frequently employed. It represents a distributed AR framework providing ad hoc interoperability of services, that self-assemble into AR systems.

AR applications must efficiently handle spatial information of real and virtual objects in order to provide a “natural” feeling of the augmented world to the user. In addition to the mere location-awareness they involve situational aspects that are related to the user more and more. As a matter of fact the management of spatial context increasingly gains importance to applications in AR.

This thesis presents a service-oriented framework that is aimed at facilitating the integration of these aspects. It follows a novel approach in spatial context management, that incorporates traditional coordinate-based context models and contextual ontologies that are well-known from research efforts with respect to the Semantic Web. Thus efficiency is combined with a declarative knowledge representation enabling knowledge sharing and reuse.

Besides the explanation and discussion of the general research topics, the work is based on, the thesis presents a first application using the presented framework. It is a proactive safety system for vehicles, and is part of an interdisciplinary research project for user-centered driver assistance, that is supported by techniques of Augmented Reality.

Results/Implementation/Project Description

Conclusion

[ Slides Kickoff/Final (optional)]