Augmented Environments Lab

The Augmented Environments Lab (AEL) is a research group in the GVU Center at the Georgia Institute of Technology. The research, design and development activities of the AEL focus on understanding how to build interactive interactive computing environments that directly augment a user’s senses with computer generated material.

We use the term Augmented Environments to emphasize our interest in systems and experiences where the environment matters in a non-trivial way, and does not just act as a background for overlaid computer media. From the artifacts in a historic home to the people sharing a game around a kitchen table, the place or people are what gives the experience its meaning. Most of our work is in the area of Augmented Reality (AR), where a media (typically graphics) are spatially registered with a user’s perception of the world around them, such as through the use of see-through head-worn displays, video-mixed camera phones and headphones with spatialized sound.

We also do work in the broader space of Mixed Reality (MR), using mobile and wearable devices to create contextualized experiences in interesting places. Our interest lies at many levels: from content through design through interaction techniques and game mechanics.

The projects in the lab are often driven initially by applications or design problems; we believe that tackling interesting problems, such as communication between machinery and workers on poultry processing lines, and design challenges, such as exploring multiple viewpoints in an interactive drama, pushes forward our understanding of the field. To support our work, we build tools to enable non-technologists to work with AR and MR systems, such as enabling designers to use the Director authoring environment or game players to experiment with AR in massively multiplayer online worlds such as SecondLife.