GVU Center Brown Bag: The Argon Project, and the Past, Present and Future of Augmented Reality on the Web

We started the Argon project in the Augmented Environments Lab at Georgia Tech back in 2009, to explore the idea of integrating Augmented Reality (AR) technology into mobile web browsers, and letting web developers create AR experiences without the need to build and ship mobile applications. This past September, we shipped Argon4, the fourth version of the Argon AR-enabled web browser for iOS, and open-sourced the argon.js framework at https://argonjs.io. The current design of Argon4 and argon.js is based on a set of principles we have developed to support the creation and delivery of AR experiences in a heterogeneous ecosystem of interaction and display devices and AR sensing technologies. Argon's design is aimed at allowing users to run multiple independently authored AR experiences at once, using different representations of reality as the backdrop for these applications, putting the user in control of when and how they interact with AR content.

In this talk, we will discuss the history and research goals of the Argon project, the architecture and capabilities of the software, and our ongoing research. In addition, late last year Blair MacIntyre joined Mozilla (on leave from GT) to begin an effort to bring AR technology to mainstream web browsers, so we will close this talk with his perspective on the future of AR on the web.

As director of the Augmented Environments Lab, Professor Blair MacIntyre's research has focused on the design and implementation of interactive mixed-reality and augmented-reality environments. The current focus of his work is on building web-based tools for delivering educational, entertainment and gaming applications of augmented and mixed reality, especially those that use personal displays to directly augment a user's perception of their environment. He is on leave from Georgia Tech, and is currently a Principal Research Scientist in the Emerging Technologies team at Mozilla, looking at how to integrate AR technologies into modern web browsers. Gheric Speiginer is a PhD Student in Human Centered Computing at Georgia Tech and received his undergraduate degree in Computer Science at Hampton University. Gheric is interested in exploring novel user interfaces and interaction techniques, particularly those that exploit the unique capabilities of augmented reality. His current research focus explores software architectures for AR applications that support heterogeneous displays and user goals, and the use of adaptive user interface concepts in order to address dynamically changing contexts in augmented reality experiences. His research is supported by the NSF GRFP and GEM fellowships. Gheric is a PhD student advised by Dr. Blair MacIntyre in the Augmented Environments Lab at the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech.