Guest Editors' Introduction: Special Section on The International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR)

THE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR) is pleased to again this year present a special section of the best papers from the annual conference. Mixed and augmented reality continue to show dramatic improvements in capabilities and the reach of applications; this year’s award winning papers demonstrate this progress quite well. The ISMAR submission process continues to increase in competitiveness, with 25 percent of the submitted papers accepted to the 2008 conference; among those, the following three papers are extended versions of those that were considered to be the best of the program. One critical technology for augmented reality (AR) is tracking of the viewpoint; computer vision techniques often form the basis for algorithms. But in order to take advantage of camera phones as AR platforms, one must modify the (traditionally expensive)visionprocessingtorun with limited computational resources. In “Real-Time Detection and Tracking for Augmented Reality on Mobile Phones,” Daniel Wagner, Gerhard Reitmayr, Alessandro Mulloni, Tom Drummond, and Dieter Schmalstieg adapt the SIFT and Ferns descriptors andatemplate-based tracker, achieving increased robustness of the tracking while still enabling real-time application performance (15 Hz). They further analyze the performance of the vision algorithms to guide future research. We have all seen computer graphics in movies that were too obviously different from the background video to be considered a part of the same image. In “Simulating LowCost Cameras for Augmented Reality Compositing,” Georg Klein and David W. Murray attack the analogous problem for mixed reality: matching the appearance of the overlaid graphics to the appearance of the background video. They present an analysis of the image capture pipeline in small video cameras, entailing lens effects, color mask, sensor properties, in-camera processing, and color space conversion. They continue by demonstrating algorithms that degrade the image quality of the augmenting graphics to include these same effects, resulting in a much more convincing mixture of the real and virtual imagery. Another long-standing goal for AR is the improvement of the capabilities of optical see-through displays. One common complaint is that the focus of most such displays is fixed, thus preventing the user from being able to focus on both the real and virtual information presented at a range of distances from the user. In “A Novel Prototype for an Optical SeeThrough Head-Mounted Display with Addressable Focus Cues,” Sheng Liu, Hong Hua, and Dewen Cheng present a prototype display that enables addressable focus cues in the presentation of graphics. They describe two implementations, enabled by a liquid lens. They present results from two studies of users’ perceptual understanding of depth as well as accomodative response, both of which demonstrate the natural interaction of the user with the augmenting graphics. We would like to thank a number of people who were instrumental in the award process for ISMAR: D’nardo Colucci, Dean DeJong, Stephen DiVerdi, Steven Feiner, Jan Fischer, Hirokazu Kato, Kiyoshi Kiyokawa, Vincent Lepetit, David Marimon, David Mizell, Nassir Navab, Ulrich Neumann, Alex Olwal, Dirk Reiners, Gilles Simon, Andrei State, Hideyuki Tamura, and Suya You.