Augmented Reality using a Virtual Reality setup

Abstract

Augmented reality is a very new market and at moment only available for early adopters. The available products are expensive and still under development. Furthermore, the current products can only augment a small percentage of the user’s field of view. The product described in this thesis uses equipment available on the consumers market to implement augmented reality. By connecting two cameras to an Oculus Rift and some additional hardware, an environment is created in which the users can experience augmented reality with virtual reality equipment. The additional hardware consists of an FPGA and a personal computer taking care of adding content to the virtual image of the real world. Directly connecting the cameras to the FPGA results in a short low latency path. This should allow the user to perceive the world with the least possible amount of introduced lag. The prototype is not finished yet, so whether it’s possible to achieve the low-latency throughput is still not known. However, the modules that are responsible for reading from an HDMI input, writing to an HDMI output, controlling the memory and conversion between color spaces have already been implemented. The details of these implementations are discussed in this document.