Wireless Displays in Educational Augmented Reality Applications

Augmented Reality (AR) as defined by Azuma [1] does not pose restrictions onoutput devices to be used for AR. Starting with light-weight notebooks and ultramobile PCs, recently smartphones became favorite AR output devices. They representa class of self contained computing units, providing (usually limited) computingpower as well as input and output peripherals - all in one device.In contrast to that are output devices without a general computing processing unitwhich rely on external source to create and transfer image data. The latter are ofinterest in this work.In this chapter we present wireless technologies that can be used to transmit uncompressedstereoscopic video signals to wireless displays in real time. We introducetwo output devices, a stereoscopic head mounted display (HMD) and a TFTdisplay module. Both of them have been adapted to act as wireless receivers in orderto display wirelessly streamed AR content. Next we focus on advantages ofwireless displays for educational AR applications. By way of example two educationalAR applications are presented which were used to demonstrate and testwireless displays. A number of teaching scenarios are described where teachersand students greatly benefit from the use of wireless displays. We briefly summarizethe results of our observations while developing and evaluating these displays.