Researchers have been working in the field of virtual reality (VR) for many decades. It allows users to immerse themselves in the realistic-looking world. However, no matter how excellent and brilliant this synthetic world is, it cannot replace the real world. Instead of creating an artificial world for users, we can augment our real world. This is the goal of Augmented Reality (AR). AR refers to computer displays that integrate 3-D virtual objects into 3-D real environment in real time. Thus, AR is to supplement reality, but not replace it completely....[ Read more ]

Researchers have been working in the field of virtual reality (VR) for many decades. It allows users to immerse themselves in the realistic-looking world. However, no matter how excellent and brilliant this synthetic world is, it cannot replace the real world. Instead of creating an artificial world for users, we can augment our real world. This is the goal of Augmented Reality (AR). AR refers to computer displays that integrate 3-D virtual objects into 3-D real environment in real time. Thus, AR is to supplement reality, but not replace it completely.

An AR system was designed to provide an enhanced view of the real world through a video see-through head-mounted display. A hardware driver board was built as a bridge between the input sources and the liquid-crystal-on-silicon (LCoS) micro-display. The double frame rate technique, de-interlace technique, synchronization technique, keying technique and micro-display driving were applied on this system. A clearly, sharply and stably images with resolution of 704 pixels x 480 pixels could be seen on the micro-display.

At the beginning of this thesis, an introduction will conduct for the clarifying the concept and the definition of VR and AR. Then, it will move into the topic of the design of VR system. Later, it will move into the topic of the design of the hardware driver board for video-front AR system. Furthermore, a video-back AR system and the specifications will be discussed. Finally, a conclusion will be made for evaluation this prototype.