Ramesh Raskar presentation this Friday

Ramesh Raskar from MERL (Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs) has kindly agreed to give a presentation for us, which will take place this Friday August 5th from 10am-12pm in the ZML. Everyone is invited.

Ramesh and his lab are doing some amazing work, and I highly encourage you to attend if you can possibly make it.

Spatial Augmented Reality
Ramesh Raskar
Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs (MERL), Cambridge, MA USA
http://www.merl.com/people/raskar/raskar.html

The goal of Augmented Reality (AR) is to insert computer-generated virtual
objects in the real world and the challenge is in creating an illusion of
consistency between the real and the virtual environments. Traditional AR
approaches involve head-mounted, eye-worn or hand-held displays. But we
can draw parallels between the displays techniques used for virtual
reality (VR) and AR, and speculate about the alternative approaches for
AR.

In this talk I will discuss new practical alternatives using spatially
augmented displays. The spatially augmented reality (SAR) approach
exploits video projectors, cameras, radio frequency tags such as RFID,
large optical elements, holograms and tracking technologies. The
underlying techniques in SAR overcome some of the annoyances of the
eye-worn AR in authoring, identification and image registration. I will
discuss enabling techniques and describe our experience with applications
in industrial maintanance, entertainment, art, education and various forms
of human computer interactions.

Bio

Ramesh Raskar joined MERL as a Research Scientist in 2000 after his
doctoral research at U. of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he
developed a framework for projector based displays. His work spans a range
of topics in computer vision and graphics including projective geometry,
non-photorealistic rendering and intelligent user interfaces. Current
projects include composite RFID (RFIG), multi-flash non-photorealistic
camera for depth edge detection, locale-aware mobile projectors, high
dynamic range video, image fusion for context enhancement and quadric
transfer methods for multi-projector curved screen displays.

Dr. Raskar received the TR100 Award, Technology Review's 100 Top Young
Innovators Under 35, 2004, Global Indus Technovator Award 2003, instituted
at MIT to recognize the top 20 Indian technology innovators on the globe,
Mitsubishi Electric Valuable Invention Award 2004 and Mitsubishi Electric
Information Technology R&D Award 2003. He is a member of the ACM and IEEE.