ISEGI-NOVA AR Project Augmented Reality applied to the Universidade Nova de Lisboa

In recent years, information technologies have progressed at an accelerated pace. The need to combine the availability of the information with portability has been fostering the evolution of technological devices, while producing some paradigm shifts. Mobile computing, in particular, is an area increasingly put to use and recognized as necessary in terms of adding value to an information society, namely through smartphones. At the same time, Augmented Reality (AR) - or the act of superimposing virtual elements to the image captured in real time - has been taking advantage of the rapid evolution in terms of the smartphones' processing capabilities. The ISEGI-NOVA AR Project, presented in this work, consists in developing and deploying an Augmented Reality system to assure a multitude of services, directed to the smartphone medium. These services, making use of existing AR third party technologies, allow users to interact with multimedia layers (images, sounds, video, web content, animations) superimposed to the image captured by the smartphone camera. Besides the ability to provide Augmented Reality contents, the ISEGI-NOVA AR Project's scope includes the development of a web-based platform that allows dynamic Augmented Reality experiences creation, through graphical user interfaces.