SETH HALL: Recipient of COLAB PHD SCHOLARSHIP
(Photo courtesy of Seth Hall)
Last year CoLab open up applications for a PHD Scholarship to the value of NZ$25,000 (exempt from tax). The three year scholarship was for a full-time PHD student undertaking research within the Faculty of Design & Creative Technologies. Intended to promote research that involves the development, application or critical engagement with new technologies, the CoLab PHD scholarship was to encourage research through the application of creativity and foregrounds the development of new applications and opportunities across the creative and technology sectors, in keeping with CoLab’s cross disciplinary engagement with the arts and science. Applications were open to theoretical, applied or practice-based research processes with a research proposal that clearly articulated a hypothesis or research question(s).
After a hard selection process, CoLab is pleased to announce that the selected recipient for the CoLab PHD Scholarship was Seth Hall with his proposal entitled Mobile Augmented Reality Systems Using Location-Based Information.
Augmented Reality is a field of research that combines the user's environment with computer generated entities, where virtual objects are blended into the video footage in real time and registered in 3D. Seth's thesis proposes to explores solutions for mobile augmented reality (MAR). MAR is a young and vibrant research field with many interesting avenues yet to be explored. There are several groups worldwide working in mobile augmented reality, such as Graz University, the University of Canterbury Hit Lab, and the Nokia Research Centre. Many of the groups have primarily utilized fiduciary markers to achieve MAR, which have limited the applicability of their results.
Seth's thesis proposes using approaches spearheaded by Nokia and which other universities have initiated, to investigate the adaptation of existing augmented reality techniques for mobile devices and to find a solution for mobile augmented reality comparing entirely client-based processing with server-assisted and cloud-based computing approaches for MAR. His thesis will put to use environmental data such as location-based information obtained from a GPS receiver and via the mobile camera utilize computer vision algorithms to aid in recognizing known landmark and structural features. Seth's thesis will investigate how these components can be combined to develop new applications for mobile augmented reality such as location-based games, improved navigation and image recognition tools as well as other artistic and performance endeavours. His thesis will also focus on creating new algorithms and techniques to exploit emerging capabilities of next generation devices.
