Exhibit Transparency via Smartphone... Augmented Reality 'Wonderscope' Developed

Lee Woo-hoon and Lee Ki-hyuk KAIST Research Team

Wonderscope for smartphones with exhibition transparency developed by the KAIST research team.

[Asia Economy Reporter Kim Bong-su] The Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) announced on the 13th that a research team led by Professor Woo-Hoon Lee from the Department of Industrial Design and Professor Ki-Hyuk Lee from the School of Computing has developed a new augmented reality device called WonderScope that allows users to see through the surface of objects to their interiors. By attaching WonderScope to a smartphone and connecting via Bluetooth, users can open an app and view the inside of exhibits like a magic lens.

Nowadays, when visiting science museums, visitors can often experience augmented reality apps on smartphones or tablets. These apps provide a unique viewing experience by adding digital information to real exhibits. However, visitors usually have to keep some distance from the exhibits and look at the mobile screen. As a result, they tend to focus more on the digital content on the screen rather than the actual exhibit. Due to the distance between the exhibit and the mobile device and the distraction in between, augmented reality apps can sometimes cause visitors to feel detached from the exhibits. To solve this problem, magic lens augmented reality that allows seeing inside the exhibit from its surface is needed.

For this, the smartphone must determine its position on the exhibit’s surface. Typically, to locate the smartphone, additional recognition devices are installed inside or outside the exhibit, or special patterns are printed on the exhibit’s surface. This complicates the exhibit’s appearance and imposes many spatial constraints, making it practically difficult to implement magic lens augmented reality on the exhibit surface.

WonderScope determines the smartphone’s position on the exhibit surface in a much more practical way. First, it reads small RFID tags attached to the exhibit surface to identify their location, then calculates the moving smartphone’s position by adding relative movement amounts based on two optical displacement sensors and an accelerometer. The research team also considered the smartphone’s height and the characteristics of the exhibit surface to calculate the position as accurately as possible. By attaching or embedding RFID tags on science museum exhibits, visitors can easily experience magic lens-like augmented reality effects on their smartphones.

For broad application of WonderScope, it must be able to determine position on various exhibit surfaces. To this end, WonderScope uses outputs from two complementary optical displacement sensors along with accelerometer data, enabling stable position detection on diverse materials such as paper, stone, wood, plastic, acrylic, and glass, as well as on surfaces with irregularities or physical patterns. Along with these features, WonderScope can detect position within about 4 cm from the surface, allowing simple 3D interactions near the exhibit surface.

The research team developed various example project templates and WonderScope support tools using Unity, a universal virtual reality (VR) and game engine, to facilitate easy smartphone app creation. WonderScope can be used in conjunction with Android-based smartwatches, smartphones, and tablets, making it applicable to exhibits in various forms.

The research team demonstrated WonderScope at the Emerging Technologies exhibition of ACM SIGGRAPH, a conference on computer graphics and interactive technologies held in Vancouver, Canada, from August 8 to 11 this year. At this conference showcasing the latest global interactive technologies, the team received the Best in Show Honorable Mention award. The judges commented that "WonderScope will be a new technology providing visitors with the joy of participation in exhibition spaces such as museums."

WonderScope is a cylindrical app accessory module with a diameter of 5 cm and a height of 4.5 cm, small enough to be easily attached to smartphones and embedded inside most exhibits without issues. Professor Lee explained, "WonderScope will have various applications not only in education but also in commercial exhibitions," adding, "Furthermore, it is expected to be used as an interactive teaching tool that stimulates children’s curiosity."

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.