‘Augmented Reality’ Adds New Layer to Real World

Step outside and look at the world. In Manhattan, you’ll see a cityscape of buildings and traffic.

If you’re a firefighter, a police sharpshooter or a tourist hankering for Chinese food, you’d want to add information to that streetscape.

Soon you’ll have that option--without opening a map or guidebook.

An emerging technology known as “augmented reality” will allow people peering through computer-fueled goggles to see virtual images overlaid on those of the real world.

For a firefighter, the computer-aided streetscape might show locations of stored chemicals and sprinkler connections.

For the police officer, the goggles could relay aerial surveillance images of a berserk gunman, helping the officer get a bead on the bad guy.

For the tourist, the glasses might show a virtual arrow and message reading, “Joe’s Shanghai, turn right, walk three blocks.”

For now, augmented reality--a clever amalgam of computing, global positioning system navigation and a device that tracks a person’s head movement--lives mainly in the cluttered realm of university research labs.

The systems are supposed to first determine the user’s exact location and field of vision. Then, depending on the program running on the hard drive, the computer augments the scene with images.

Researchers at Columbia University are fashioning some of the innovations. There, users can strap on a backpack frame bristling with 25 pounds of antennas, batteries and computing gear and take a tour of the campus.

Instead of displaying only the university’s Greek revival halls and tree-draped plazas, the computer goggles superimpose images of long-demolished Victorian buildings that housed a mental institution predating the school. Building name tags pop up and disappear when you turn your head to gaze around the campus.

The project, created by Columbia’s schools of computer science and journalism, has a more pressing purpose than mere campus orientation.

The lead federal agency funding this is the U.S. Navy’s Office of Naval Research, which is spending $2.5 million a year on augmented reality research.

Spurred by the deaths of U.S. soldiers in Somalia in 1993, the Navy wants scientists to develop a belt buckle-size computer and slim computer glasses to help the Marines fight better in cities.

The Navy also is developing a version for amphibious landing craft to guide invasion forces through minefields and fog.

Other research projects underway across the United States and elsewhere aim to use augmented reality to aid everything from surgery to jet-engine repair.

Columbia computer science professor Steven Feiner, who gets about $150,000 a year of the Navy’s funding, is developing the visual interfaces seen by wearers of the computer goggles.

The clunky backpack system built by Feiner and his students is cobbled together from a laptop computer and a pair of GPS satellite receivers along with a head-tracking device, a high-speed wireless Internet connection and a tiny video camera.

When the wearer’s location calls for the computer to augment the scene with an image, it pops up on a pair of Sony goggles with a see-through liquid crystal computer display.

“We are not implying that someone should walk around with something that weighs even half of this,” Feiner said. “Being able to look at stuff and seeing information in context with that stuff, that’s what it’s all about.”

Augmented reality should be ready for consumer use in a decade or so, Feiner said.

First, U.S. soldiers will be trying it on for size.

One impetus for the Office of Naval Research’s Battlefield Augmented Reality System, known as BARS, was the 1993 battle of Mogadishu, in which 18 Americans--and hundreds of Somalis--died in fierce urban combat.

In the Mogadishu battle, U.S. soldiers on a critical rescue mission got lost in the city’s alleys because street signs had been taken down.

In future city battles, a soldier with augmented reality goggles will see labels on buildings and streets and also active details, such as areas of sniper fire and friendly forces, said Lawrence Rosenblum, director of virtual reality research and systems at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington.

“All of a sudden he can be really involved in what’s happening and know what’s going on around him,” Rosenblum said.