A Mobile Augmented Reality System with Distributed Tracking

For AR applications the 3D position and direction of the users view have to be determined in real time. At the same time, the augmentation, one or more 3D objects, have to be rendered. This article describes a distributed mobile AR-System designed for industrial service applications. By distributing the different tasks involved in AR, the computational load of the portable system can be minimized such that a small and lightweight computer can be used. The portable computer is connected to a backend server via WLAN. Minimisation of the bandwidth usage of the system ensures that 20 or more systems can operate on one standard WLAN access point. The main focus of this article is to minimise the computational load of the mobile system and the network load simultaneously.