As part of the LOCUS project, last month, the Journal of Virtual Reality and Broadcasting (JVRB) has published an article I wrote with colleagues from City University, with title ‘Exploring Urban Environments Using Virtual and Augmented Reality’. The paper proposes the use of a specific mobile architecture, for navigation in urban environments. The aim of this work is to assess how virtual and augmented reality interface paradigms can provide enhanced location based services using real-time techniques in the context of these two different technologies.
The virtual reality interface is based on faithful graphical representation of the localities of interest, coupled with sensory information on the location and orientation of the user, while the augmented reality interface uses computer vision techniques to capture patterns from the real environment and overlay additional way-finding information, aligned with real imagery, in real-time. The knowledge obtained from the evaluation of the virtual reality navigational experience has been used to inform the design of the augmented reality interface. Finally, some initial results of the user testing of the experimental system for navigation are presented.The original article may be accessed online from here.