Spatial Augmented Reality: Merging Real and Virtual Worlds
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By Oliver Bimber, Ramesh Raskar
Produced By A K Peters LTD
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First printed in 2005, this book?s techniques are not exactly the cutting edge in terms of AR practices ? it hails from the first days of AR?s emergence. Even so, it is very comprehensive, and leads the reader from the first simple introductions, up to actual implementation of augmented reality for practical applications in immersive education and entertainment.

Taken from the opening chapter:

Like Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR) is becoming an emerging edutainment platform for museums. Many artists have started using this technology in semi-permanent exhibitions. Industrial use of augmented reality is also on the rise. Some of these efforts are, however, limited to using off-the-shelf head-worn displays. New, application-specific alternative display approaches pave the way towards flexibility, higher efficiency, and new applications for augmented reality in many non-mobile application domains. Novel approaches have taken augmented reality beyond traditional eye-worn or hand-held displays, enabling new application areas for museums, edutainment, research, industry, and the art community. This book discusses spatial augmented reality (SAR) approaches that exploit large optical elements and video-projectors, as well as interactive rendering algorithms, calibration techniques, and display examples. It provides a comprehensive overview with detailed mathematics equations and formulas, code fragments, and implementation instructions that enable interested readers to realise spatial AR displays by themselves. This chapter will give a brief and general introduction into augmented reality and its current research challenges. It also outlines the remaining chapters of the book.


The book is highly technical, and opens on photon-wave mechanics before moving on to how the human eye works, setting up the fundamentals you should have a grasp of in order to understand how to light, shade and render two realities blended together. It does this before it even describes such techniques so that you can understand how light is interpreted itself.

As such this is not a lightweight book, nor is it for a casual reader. Weighing in at just under 400 pages, what it attempts, is to instill a good, solid foundation to build upon with other works, and enough experience of actual projects to provide a step up for your own real enterprises.

Special Features:

* Comprehensive overview
* Detailed mathematical equations
* Code fragments
* Implementation instructions
* Examples of Spatial AR displays