Bristol academic to chair augmented reality conference

A Bristol academic is to chair a major augmented reality conference, the University of Bristol reports.

Professor Walterio Mayol-Cuevas of Bristol University’s Department of Computer Science is to chair the 2016 ISMAR conference, the most prominent academic conference on augmented and mixed reality, which is being held from 19th-23rd September in Mérida, Mexico.

Augmented and mixed reality are part of a continuum ranging from purely virtual worlds to the mixing of real objects and scenes with virtual information. At its centre are core problems such as spatial mapping, visualisation and mobile hardware architectures, as well as the human factors of perception and usability.

ISMAR, which is sponsored by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), attracts hundreds of participants from academia and industry. It has been fundamental in the development of technologies that have had an effect in other areas, including real-time Visual Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping (VSLAM) which enables spatial representations of the surroundings and allows virtual information to be put in context immediately. Real-time VSLAM has had applications in areas such as robotics and is now an established area in computer vision.

Professor Mayol-Cuevas’ work with colleagues on VSLAM has been showcased at ISMAR since 2003. His areas of research comprise robotics, computer vision and wearable computing.