The Challenge of Making Augmented Reality Work Outdoors

Despite its potential, Augmented Reality has not received nearly the amount of attention paid to its sibling, Virtual Environments (or Virtual Reality), despite the fact that both fields share a common ancestor. It is often forgotten that Sutherland’s original HMD system was an optical see-through display. While the creators of that system did not explicitly attempt to register virtual 3-D objects with real-world objects, they did have an example of combining virtual and real. The motivation was to allow the user to issue commands. The problem was that the graphics engine did not have sufficient power to draw the menus and commands virtually at interactive rates. Therefore, they physically put large signs with the command names on a real wall, and allowed the user to virtually select one of the real signs by pointing at one with the hand controller. Despite this common root, most efforts following Sutherland’s focused on Virtual Environments. It wasn’t until the late 1980’s and early 1990’s that research in Augmented Reality began again in earnest.