Cultural Heritage Layers: Integrating Historic Media in Augmented Reality

In this paper we are presenting Cultural Heritage Layers, an approach that enables the visualization of historic media like drawings, paintings and photographs of buildings and historic scenes seamlessly superimposed on reality via video see through using X3D. This enables simple, inexpensive and sustainable Augmented Reality applications in the cultural heritage and architectural area based on industry standards. The main idea is to use existing historic media from archives and superimpose them seamlessly on reality at the right spot. These locative layers are context sensitively telling the location´s history and create the impression of a virtual time journey. The registration of the virtual objects in the video images is provided by a robust 6DOF tracking framework based on two technologies that work in tandem: an initialization step based on Randomized Trees and a frame-to-frame tracking phase based on KLT. The entire application runs in real time on current Ultra Mobile PCs and MIDs.