Augmented Reality (AR) overlays the real world with a complementary
virtual world, typically through the use of tracked displays:
see-through head-worn or hand-held displays, or projectors.  This talk
will discuss three roles that AR can play in designing user
interfaces, drawing on examples from research directions being pursued
by Columbia's Computer Graphics and User Interfaces Lab.  An
overarching theme of our work is that of the world itself as the user
interface, made possible through ubiquitous sensors and displays.

One role for AR is to create working prototypes of technologies that
do not yet exist.  An example I will present emulates a tracked,
watch-sized, wrist-worn projector to explore how a user might interact
with it.  A second role is that of a user interface in its own right,
with an emphasis on mobile interaction.  Here, I will describe
research performed as part of a collaboration with colleagues at the
University of Maryland, the Smithsonian Institution, and Columbia to
develop electronic field guides for botanists. A botanist photographs
leaves in the field, and the system invokes automated vision-based
recognition algorithms on the images, and supports the botanist in
examining ranked sets of possible matches to assist in species
identification.  One issue we address is how AR can make the system
self documenting.  Finally, a third role I will discuss is augmenting
appropriate parts of a task domain to transform them into interaction
devices. I will present our work on opportunistic controls, in which
existing domain objects are selected because of their physical
affordances, tracked, and overlaid with graphics to make them into
part of the user interface.


---- Bio

Steven Feiner is Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University,
where he directs the Computer Graphics and User Interfaces Lab. He
received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Brown
University. Prof. Feiner's research interests include augmented
reality and virtual environments, knowledge-based design of graphics
and multimedia, mobile and wearable computing, information
visualization, and games. He is coauthor of Computer Graphics:
Principles and Practice (Addison-Wesley, 1990) and Introduction to
Computer Graphics (Addison-Wesley, 1993). In 1991 he received an ONR
Young Investigator Award. Over the past five years, Prof. Feiner has
been general chair or cochair for ACM VRST 2008 (15th Symposium on
Virtual Reality Software and Technology), INTETAIN 2008 (Second
International Conference on Intelligent Technologies for Interactive
Entertainment), and ACM UIST 2004 (17th Symposium on User Interface
Software and Technology); program cochair for IEEE ISWC 2003 (7th
International Symposium on Wearable Computers); and member of the
steering committees for the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee
on Wearable Information Systems, IEEE and ACM International Symposium
on Mixed and Augmented Reality, and ACM Symposium on Virtual Reality
Software and Technology.