WP07 Demonstrators Developement

In the first phase of AMIRE's project the MR experts will develop together with the MR customer the first version of a MR application (in our case it will be the oil refinery application, which is described in 0). This work will be done in the WP7.1, where we will define the scope, the requirements and the target of the oil refinery application. The results will be implemented in WP7.2, which will use the AMIRE toolkit (Vers. 1).

Moreover, the objective of this workpackage is to test the applicability and generity of the AMIRE toolkit (Vers. 2) by developing a demonstrator addressed to evaluate the possibilities of MR in visiting museums. In this case the MR provider will prove the adequacy and easiness of use of the authoring tools by directly implementing the demonstrator.

The work will be carried out in two sequential phases: WP7.3 "Demonstrator 2 Requirements and target specifications" and WP 7.4 "Development of Demonstrator 2".

Application requirements

During WP 7.3 the end-user of this application will define the application requirements. To do that, an analysis of existing and current applications as well as research projects using MR at museums will be carried out. This will allow to identify the core functionalities of this reduced prototype. Concerning hardware requirements several alternatives to combine the real and virtual images into a single one will be evaluated and explored during this WP: Monitor based viewing (PDA), video see-through and optical see-through. The definition of requirements for position and orientation tracking will be other key-issue. In addition to that, specifications of the dedicated authoring tool oriented to the end-user application maintenance will be identified.

Prototype development

The second task WP7.4 will consist in the development, by the MR provider, of the prototype according to the requirements, to perform the preliminary laboratory tests of code and to carry on an on-site evaluation. At the end, the results of this demonstrator will allow to validate refine and extend the functionalities and proposed methodology of the AMIRE toolkit.

A closer description of the two different demonstrators can be found below.

The Oil Refinery Application

The scope of AMIRE's first prototype, the oil refinery application, is concentrating on the following areas: for maintenance and service on power plant, for process plant engineering and for plant assembly.

Maintenance and service on power plant, a PDA-solution

The mobile AR system developed using AMIRE technology features a mobile device (e.g., a pocket PC like the Compaq iPAQ) that is connected via wireless LAN to the OMV AMIRE server. The mobile device will be equipped with a mounted camera (see Figure) that allows capturing the environment. The system recognizes objects in the real refinery and asks the employee if he/she is interested in an interactive tutorial about working procedure at the current machine.

Important information about the machine, e.g., technical data, instructions how to operate it, repair and maintenance illustrations are generated and interactively displayed on the mobile device. In this case, augmented reality both replaces the conventional instruction manual and provides additional current process-related information, such as pressure, temperature, and speed.

Moreover, the application scenario of diagnostics and service on production machines have the aim to support service technicians and customers with fault diagnostics, commissioning, maintenance, and repair in situ or by direct interaction with the service center by using augmented reality technologies and thus to increase the availability of plants.

The plant information system is used to provide information to the PDA. This information might be texts, design drawings, circuit diagrams, spoken instructions, video sequences or a 3D object.

Plant assembly, a HMD-solution

The objective of AR in assembly is to investigate the possibilities of optimization of assembly. In that way, application fields that differ in complexity and frequency of recurrence are considered in respect of AR support. If the technician doesn't know how to assemble two parts of a device, he/she can get detailed process-related information and instruction information in the see-through-display (e.g. HMD-display).

The real field of vision of the technician is thus enhanced with assembly instructions and other important information. In this case, augmented reality both replaces the conventional instruction manual and provides additional current process-related information, such as pressure, temperature etc.. For the assembly process, the assembly technician obtains an overlay of the real view with virtual text, graphic, and multimedia information.

The Musseum Application

This demonstrator will be oriented to test the suitability of the AMIRE toolkit in the design and implementation of an application addressed to evaluate the possibilities of mixed reality in visiting museums. One of the main objectives of museums is to provide visitors a chance to learn. For this objective, information-providing techniques for visitors are very important. In conventional museums, information or explanations of exhibited materials is presented using panels or leaflets.

However this method has several shortcomings.

• Firstly, it provides only a non-personalized very small amount of information. The information size is restricted by the physical area of the panel or paper and it doesn't takes into account the visitor preferences and background.

• Secondly, many people can't see the same panel at the same time.

In recent years, in some museums, these materials are complemented with the use of audioguides. The audioguide system gives visitors complete autonomy during their visit and provides explanations on the architecture of the building and on the exhibitions. However, this only solves partially the previous problems and only uses a unimodal (oral) way of communication.

Supported by augmented reality methods, mobile computing and wireless technology a new kind of visitor's museum information system can be created using Head Mounting Displays (HMD) or PDAs. In both cases a simple camera mounted on the device will track the visitor's point of view in real time so that virtual images will be exactly aligned with real world objects. Toolkits like ARToolkit [1, 13] use computer vision techniques to calculate the real camera position an orientation relative to marked cards.

Several alternatives to combine the real and virtual images into a single one will be evaluated and explored during the demonstrator development: monitor based viewing, video see-through and optical see through. We have identified two main components to develop the museum demonstrator: The Museum Navigation System using AR technologies and the Personalized Virtual Museum Assistant.

A) Museum Navigation System using AR technologies

A wide variety of people can visit the museum distinguished by age, education, interest, etc. It is difficult to provide satisfaction to all visitors by the same exhibits. Exhibits can be personalized in two ways:

• Selecting the appropriated pieces of an exhibition (those of interest for the visitor) and establishing a personalized visiting path.

• Showing real, sensivity-rich exhibition pieces augmented by virtual objects with hyper-links for accessing detailed and visitor's adapted information.

B) Personalized Virtual Museum Assistant

An essential element in a visit to a museum is the human guide. An element that stands in for a human guide must be considered in an visit to an interactive virtual museum, as a tool that may be complement other multi-sensorial information that visitor receives.

Personalized virtual guides/assistants can be considered as part of an interactive virtual museum. The virtual guide, implemented as an instantiation of a "virtual character" provided by the AMIRE MR component library, would be in charge of providing personalized assistance and information about masterpieces that may help visitors to understand and appreciate them. Hence the visitors will be closed to the world of art and guided through the adequate path in their visit.

The virtual guide functions will be those of human guides, i.e. they will give visitors a brief description of the exhibition and for each masterpiece profile, author background and historic creation period, etc.