UC expert receives international award for the best global paper in a decade

University of Canterbury Associate Professor Mark Billinghurst has received an international award for the best electrical engineering paper presented globally in the last decade.

Billinghurst has received the Lasting Impact Award by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) at its conference in Atlanta, USA.

His paper was on augmented reality. He said he highlighted the new development of a computer vision tracking library that allowed the position of a camera to be determined relative to a printed square image.

``I explained the use of this tracking library to develop a new type of video conferencing system where images of remote people could be superimposed over the real world. The tracking library was released as the ARToolKit software which quickly became the most popular tracking library for augmented reality.

``Being able to know where the position of a camera is in the real world is a basic enabling technology for augmented reality. By developing and releasing this software we helped thousands of researchers get involved in augmented reality. This significantly expanded the research field and helped create an augmented reality industry.’‘

Augmented reality (AR) is one of the world’s latest digital technologies that allows computer graphics to be inserted into a view of the real world and creates the illusion of virtual content becoming part of the user’s real environment.

It has many potential applications, such as allowing doctors to see medical information superimposed over patients or providing new types of games that can be played in the real world.

AR has recently become very popular through the proliferation of mobile phones that can provide a handheld AR experience and also web technologies that allow people to have an AR experience through their web browser. Today hundreds of millions of people have technology in their pocket that can provide them with an AR experience, Professor Billinghurst said.

``The ARToolKit software is extremely popular and has over 600,000 downloads to date, which is impressive since it is a programming tool - not a finished application.

``I feel pretty humbled to have been recognized as presenting the best paper globally in the last 10 years in this field. I never would have expected the research would impact on the lives of millions of people.

``The paper has been referenced over 1300 times in the academic research literature which makes it the third highest cited paper on augmented reality ever and shows that it's had a significant impact on other people's research.’’