An Authentic Focusing System for 'Cheap' Augmented Reality

Researchers from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) have developed a method to increase the authenticity of low-cost, projection-based augmented reality installations, through special glasses that cause projected 3D images to go in and out of focus in the same way that they would if the objects were real, overcoming a critical perceptual hurdle for practical usage of projection systems in controlled environments. The IEEE system recreates depth planes for projected real and CGI imagery that will be superimposed into rooms. In this case, three CGI Stanford bunnies are being superimposed at the same depth plane as three real world objects, and their blurriness is controlled by where the viewer is looking and focusing. The system uses electrically focus-tunable lenses (ETL) embedded into the viewer's glasses (which are in any case necessary to separate the two image streams into a convincing, integrated 3D experience), and which communicate with the projection system, which then automatically changes the level of blurriness of the projected image seen by the viewer. The ETL lenses report back information about the user's focal attention and sets the level of blurriness on a per-plane basis for the rendering of the projected geometry.