Real view cameras

augmented reality on mobile devices took giant step forward in last few years and this field of study is really growing quickly. what i see like a big dissapoitement is that when using mobile phone cameras, output is still just an image. it is not augmented reality, but more like new reality by itself. what i would like to see, is exactly as it would appear from my view point, not from the camera’s. i want to see “real view”, something like transparent glass instead of regular display, device should act like additional layer (to the real world) with added information. augmented reality displayed this way will feel more realistic and personalized.

Let’s say, we would like to add this kind of “view” into handheld device. Just using transparent screen won’t solve our problem, because phone will not be aware what is shown on the screen, thus it wont be able to add augmented reality to it. Screen itself is not that important, what really matters is system of detectors and cameras that will gather information around the device (front and back).

Simulating this behaviour is possible with added sensors to our device. we will need to detect face, looking at the screen, and it’s distance as well. 2 regular front view cameras should be enough (more sofisticated approach with better precision is highly suggested, such as infrared/depth sensors or similar). information gathered from this frontal detection system will be sufficient to determine in which angle we are looking at the screen and what is in our field of view as shown below.

Having the exact position of our eyes gives us enough information, what should be displayed on the display. cropping and transforming image from camera can result in Real view. This is just a next step to augmented reality beeing more based on “reality”.

Note: Considering wide angles, from where you can look at your device, one camera might not be sufficient to display Real view, but adding wide-angle camera or combining set of regular ones can achieve great results.