First steps towards handheld augmented reality

Abstract

In this paper we describe the first stand-alone AugmentedReality (AR) system with self-tracking running on anunmodified personal digital assistant (PDA) with acommercial camera. The project exploits the readyavailability of consumer devices with a minimal need forinfrastructure. The application provides the user with athree-dimensional augmented view of the environment.Our system achieves good overlay registration accuracyby using a popular marker-based tracking toolkit(ARToolKit), which runs directly on the PDA. Weintroduce an optional client/server architecture that isbased on wireless networking and is able to dynamicallyand transparently offload the tracking task in order toprovide better performance in select areas. Thehardware/software framework is modular and can beeasily combined with many elements of an existing ARframework. As a demonstration of the effectiveness, wepresent a 3D navigation application that guides a userthrough an unknown building to a chosen location.