Abstract

The fields of Wearable Computing, Augmented Reality and Ubiquitous Computing are in principle highly convergent, as they all focus on environments where users perceive, and intuitively interact with,their surroundings. However, the reality as observed in research labs and limited commercial deployments has been that bugetary and technical constraints have actually kept these fields separate and distinct. One manifestation of this separation is in the choice of sensors used to build systems in each domain. A truly cross-disciplinary project has to incorporate sensors of much greater heterogeneity than has occurred heretofore. The way in which sensorsare deployed results in spatial seams that can act as obstacles to the provision of services across different areas.

Having examined the different architectural approaches to handling events from different tracking systems, a new architecture is proposed that maintains a consistent spatial model of objects and their inter-relationships, and configures the flow of tracking data to satisfy the needs of heterogeneous clients and the constraints imposed by the environment, or environments in the distributed case.