General-purpose modular hardware and software framework for mobile outdoor augmented reality applications in engineering

This paper presents a reusable, general-purpose, mobile augmented reality (AR) framework developed to address the critical and repetitive challenges specific to visualization in outdoor AR. In all engineering applications of AR developed thus far, basic functionality that supports accurate user registration, maximizes the range of user motion, and enables data input and output has had to be repeatedly re-implentented. This is primarily due to the fact that designed methods have been traditionally custom created for their respective applications and are not generic enough to be readily shared and reused by others. The objective of this research was to remedy this situation by designing and implementing a reusable and pluggable hardware and software framework that can be used in any AR application without the need to re-implement low-level communication interfaces with selected hardware. The underlying methods of hardware communication as well as the object-oriented design (OOD) of the reusable interface are presented. Details on the validation of framework reusability and pluggability are also described. (C) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.