I’m been invited to serve on the program committee for a very interesting workshop on mobile collaborative augmented reality which is part of ISMAR 2010. I’ve been interested in AR for a number of years as a means to bridge the digital physical divide. While we have many methods for bring digital information down into our physical world currently our means of bringing information into the digital is limited to mobile, desktop, gaming interfaces and sensor systems. While we look at new means of bringing the digital into our physical day to day life (such as MobileAR, which can overload us) we do need to explore methods to ease the movement of information from our physical world (without burdening people in the provision of input or obtrusive sensing).

“Mobile Augmented Reality For Art Interaction” (image from thesis)
by Laurence Judge University College Dublin Ireland

“Augmented reality is a direct or indirect view of real world scenes in which physical objects are annotated with, or overlaid by computer generated graphics. The past two decades have seen a fast growing body of research and development dedicated to techniques and technologies for augmented reality. In particular, advances in hardware and networking have made possible a wide use of augmented reality for remote collaboration. However, in order to develop systems that are truly useful and comfortable for end users, many challenges need to be addressed first.

Two of those challenges include handling environmental constraints and understanding human needs. The former requires that systems can handle ever changing real word conditions to be continuously functional, while the latter requires that systems are constructed in ways with which end users can work effectively and comfortably. To address these challenges, we invite you to a one-day workshop on research issues specific to mobile augmented reality for remote collaborations.

This workshop aims to bring industrial and academic researchers together and to provide a platform to foster discussions among participants on the current state of art and future directions for mobile collaborative augmented reality. The workshop will be held on October 13, 2010 in Seoul, Korea, in conjunction with ISMAR2010. We solicit high quality research and position papers for the workshop. Submitted papers will be peer-reviewed by our highly regarded international program committee members. Accepted papers will be published in the workshop proceedings. Currently we are investigating the possibility of including the proceedings in ACM or IEEE Digital Library, and inviting selected papers for a special issue of a journal.”

Please see the website at http://research.ict.csiro.au/conferences/collaborative-augmented-reality/ for more details.