Outdoor mobile augmented reality for past and future on-site architectural visualizations

Abstract

Mobile devices have become widely used in outdoors on-the-move applications. Our research aims at developing a system which allows users to visualize the virtual buildings, streets, historic sites, landscapes or cityscapes (in the past or future) which are rendered seamlessly with the current actual scene captured by the camera (called Augmented Reality), and interactively exploring the virtual scene in real-time while the user is moving. We use the camera PDA, the GPS receiver and the gyroscope to track the mobile device's position and orientation for virtual scene rendering. This article documents the issues regarding accurate alignment, tracking, errors and limitations with mobile devices and presents our solutions generated so far for the research in progress. © pum, 2009.