AUGMENTED REALITY ENVIRONMENT USING A WEB BROWSER: Content Presentation with a Two-Layer Display

摘要

We developed a prototype system to make an augmented reality (AR) environment using a Web browser. Although AR technology has the potential to be used in various applications, authoring/editing AR contents is a problem on the wide spread. Graphics expertise and knowledge of computer programming are necessary for creating contents for AR applications. We used a Web browser as a presentation tool so that users who had experience in creating Web contents could reuse the multimedia data as AR contents and modify the AR contents by themselves. A two-layer display was used in the system in order to superimpose virtual objects onto a real scene for creating an AR environment. Another problem is about identifying objects in the real scene. An open-source library, ARToolkit, is often used as an image-processing tool for detecting the position and orientation of markers as well as identifying them. However, the markers must be registered in the system in advance, and the registration becomes tedious work when many markers are used such as Japanese kanji characters. The optical character reader (OCR) middleware was implemented as a character-recognition function for Japanese character markers. This paper describes the system design and software architecture for constructing an AR environment using a Web browser display and the demonstration of the prototype system.