A high performance AR system for medical applications

Abstract

We report on a new single PC based stereoscopic video-see-through AR system which we developed for medical applications. Recent advances in graphics hardware, memory bandwidth, and computing power of standard PCs made it possible that this system outperforms an earlier version which included 3 networked SGI workstations. We designed and implemented a new AR software platform. It is component based and - in conjunction with XML configuration files - provides efficiency, modularity, and extensibility for fast and robust prototyping of AR applications. The system has a compelling real-time performance with 30 frames/second, displaying stereoscopic augmented video views with XGA resolution.