ments Lab at the Georgia Institute of Technology. MacIntyre says his current work in AR is driven mainly by the desire to understand how to create compelling AR experiences, interfaces, and tools. To that end, he and his team build games and study them, focusing on everything from interactiv-ity and visualization techniques to the feel of game mechanics to the social experiences they foster.

“I’m very driven to create tools and platforms that will give a broad range of people the ability to experiment with the technology,” says MacIntyre. “Just as we didn’t know what the Web would be used for until people with real problem- and design-driven goals started trying to create applications, the same will be true for AR.”

 

tightly Registered aR Games For now, MacIntyre is focusing on what he calls tightly registered AR games, in which the graphics appear to be locked onto the real world. In the ARhrrrr! game, for example, a handheld device’s graphics are aligned with the physical game board using an image tracker to determine where the camera on the handheld is located, relative to the board. The system pulls video from the camera, runs it through a vision library, and returns an estimate about the game

the mainstreaming
of augmented reality
now largely depends
on the ability to
manufacture and
sell the technology
profitably, says
steven K. feiner.

board’s relative position. Using that information, the handheld draws graphics in the camera’s view of the board. Those graphics remain locked in place over a wide range of movement by the player.

“We found that if the graphics are
unambiguously aligned with features
in the world, game players treat the
combined physical-virtual view as
one merged space,” he says. “As a re-
sult, they can refer to virtual content
smoothly and unambiguously, and
can collaborate or compete as they
would on a physical board game.”
MacIntyre says the biggest chal-
lenge he faces is with the limitations
of the vision-based tracking technol-
ogy that signals to the phone what
the camera’s relation is to the world.
“We are constantly struggling with
the tension between what we want
the games to do and what is tech-
nically possible to know about the
world and to track and interact with,”
he says. Because accuracy is directly
related to the quality of the inputs,
MacIntyre and his team use vision-
based tracking technology instead
of less-accurate alternatives such as
handheld-based GPS, compass, and
accelerometer sensors, which might
work for large-scale AR applications
but lack the precision needed for
tightly registered games.

Employment
U.S.’s Bright CS Job Forecast

The job outlook for U.s. college students majoring in computer science is very favorable, according to The Market For Computing Careers, a report by Joel adams, a professor of computer science at Calvin College. adam’s report contains an analysis of data from the U.s. bureau of Labor statistics, Computing research association’s Taulbee survey, and U. S. News & World Report.

“The U.s. bureau of
Labor statistics predicts that
computing will be one of
the fastest-growing U.s. job
markets in science, technology,
engineering, and mathematics
(s TeM) for the foreseeable
future,” according to the report,
with “nearly three out of four
new science or engineering
jobs in the U.s. going to be
in computing.” of these new
computing jobs, 27% will be in
software engineering, 21% in
computing networking, and 10%
in systems analysis.

Meanwhile, as fewer students enter Cs, the salaries for software engineers, network administrators, and systems analysts “are climbing.” according to U.S. News & World Report, the median salary for a software engineer ranged from $85,000-$92,000 in 2008, with the best-paid 10% of software engineers earning more than $136,000.

“i think the most surprising
thing [in the report] is that the
U.s. bureau of Labor statistics is
projecting more than four times
as many new jobs in computing
than in all the traditional (non-
software) engineering areas
combined,” adams said in
an email interview. “a second
surprise was their projection of
more than twice as many new
computing jobs per year than
there are computing graduates
at present. The third surprise
was that computing is the only
s TeM discipline where the
demand for graduates outstrips
the supply.