Welcome to the AR blog

Well, here it is, the first post on yet another blog.

I'm a professor and researcher focusing on Augmented Reality (AR), and have decided to create a blog to give me a place to record some of my thoughts and reactions to things related to AR.  Over the years, I've wanted to start blogging some of my thoughts on things related to augmented reality (AR), but as with many people, I felt "too busy" to keep it up.  However, AR has gotten very exciting recently, and will be "real" very soon, given the rapid advance of mobile "application processors" (e.g., the chipsets in mobile phones) from companies such as TI and NVidia.

I personally have been doing AR research since 1991, when I started my Ph.D at Columbia University, working with Steven Feiner.  Steve was one of the first academics to really have the "nerve" to push this nascent technology as a research agenda, and I was lucky to be the first student of his working on it.  During my first semester, Doree Seligmann and I built KARMA (the Knowledge-based AR Maintenance Assistant) and, guided by Steve, published a paper on it that eventually turned into a 1993 Communications of the ACM paper that is still one of the most highly cited papers on AR.

I graduated and took a job at Georgia Tech, where I've been doing AR for the past 8 or so years.  I'm lucky to be at a University that actually supports and encourages collaboration (as opposed to giving lip service to it, but then rewarding people for creating ivory towers), and the GVU Center manifests that support by creating an environment that is easily the best place in the world to do "all things related to the interplay between humans and computers".  As a result, I've been collaborating with folks like Jay Bolter (a famous professor in New Media here at Tech), Simon Julier (a talented robotics/vision researcher who was at the Naval Research Lab in DC, and is now at University College London), Michael Mateas (the co-creator of Facade, was here for a few years, now at UC Santa Cruz), and on and on.  Fortunately, GT is an awesome technical school, has the worlds #1 HCI research group, a top vision-robotic center, and is one of the best places to do research on computer games and new media:  all the thing I need to explore AR.

I could go on and on about where I work, but at the end of the day, the real point is that I get to work with a group of students and faculty studying interesting things related to AR;  games, industrial applications, the interaction between mobile AR and virtual worlds, new forms of computer vision, business collaboration, education, etc.

Anyway, I doubt anyone will read this far, but if you do, welcome!