ISMAR… Where to start…

First, thank you to the awesome people, especially Sean White of Columbia University, who helped make it possible for me to be there.

Right now I”m just going to give you the beginning of my takeaway.

The paper that resonated most with my basic desire to see the big platform problems handled first was “Global Pose Estimation using Multi-Sensor Fusion for Outdoor Augmented Reality” by Gerhard Schall, Daniel Wagner, Gerhard Reitmayr, Elise Taichmann, Manfred Wieser, Dieter Schmalstieg, and Bernhard Hofmann-Wellenhof, all out of TU Graz, Austria, with the exception Mr. Reitmayr, who is at Oxford. This is the kind of fusion work that I’ve been talking about since my first post, and it was really exciting to see people actually doing it seriously on the hardware side. The two XSens MTi OEM boards headed to the new lab for a non-AR project should have cleared customs by now. I’ll find out if they’re there on Tuesday. 🙂 I only mentioned it because it’s more-or-less the same device that was used for the inertial portion of this project, and I can’t wait to build them into something.

I also loved reading Mark Livingston’s paper on stereoscopy.

Incidentally, all of the papers, and video of all the sessions, should be getting posted soon to ISMARSociety.org. Serious props to the student volunteers who appeared to really keep things running smoothly, and who performed the awesome task of capturing all of the content on video. This, the first year of AR as a popular buzzword, is the time to share with the rest of the world just how much scientific effort is going into making real progress.

I’ve got lots to say about the HMDs, including Nokia Reasearch Center’s cool eye-tracking see-through display sunglasses prototype, but I’m going to save it for tomorrow, or perhaps for another forum. For the moment, just enjoy this photograph of Dr. Feiner stylishly rockin’ the Nokia prototype.

Hell yeah, dude.

Though we were still notably lacking Tish Shute and Rouli, this pic has a pretty stacked roster of AR blogosphere heavy-hitters in it. And speaking of Tish, I think she may be onto something with the AR Wave initiative. The diagram in her most recent post makes a great deal of sense.

And sorry to flake on the daily updates. I did end up demoing some glove stuff, and I was just generally pretty wiped out by the time I got back to my hotel each evening. ISMAR was terribly exciting for me, and have a ton more to recount.