Augmented System for Immersive 3D Expansion and Interaction

In the field of augmented reality technologies, commercial optical see-through-type wearable displays have difficulty providing immersive visual experiences, because users perceive different depths between virtual views on display surfaces and see-through views to the real world. Many cases of augmented reality applications have adopted eyeglasses-type displays (EGDs) for visualizing simple 2D information, or video see-through-type displays for minimizing virtual- and real-scene mismatch errors. In this paper, we introduce an innovative optical see-through-type wearable display hardware, called an EGD. In contrast to common head-mounted displays, which are intended for a wide field of view, our EGD provides more comfortable visual feedback at close range. Users of an EGD device can accurately manipulate close-range virtual objects and expand their view to distant real environments. To verify the feasibility of the EGD technology, subject-based experiments and analysis are performed. The analysis results and EGD-related application examples show that EGD is useful for visually expanding immersive 3D augmented environments consisting of multiple displays.