VIS Keynote Address : When Visualization Met Augmented Reality

In the past year, Augmented Reality (AR) has been introduced in several products of premier technology companies, addressing billions of mobile computing users. In particular, a new breed of AR games is engaging and visually appealing. In contrast, non-entertainment applications of AR generally tend to lack sophisticated content. This can be related to the fact that AR developers are only learning how to effectively use the new medium. But it also has to do with the lack of overlap in AR research and visualization research. While AR research has mostly been driven by computer vision with minimal consideration of the visual output, VIS is the field where the perceptual and cognitive foundations of visual information are studied. AR needs VIS! As AR matures, it will be vital to bring the two fields together. VIS needs to address the new medium AR, embracing its two key aspects: mobility and mixed real+virtual perception. AR poses new challenges for VIS, as the visual information needs to adapt to reality rather than shaping the entire visual domain. This talk will discuss fundamental properties of AR visualization and present examples of previous, current and future work.