Mobile Augmented Reality (MAR) is widely regarded as one of the most promising technologies in the next ten years. With MAR, we are able to blend information from our senses and mobile devices in myriad ways that were not possible before. The way to supplement the real world other than to replace real world with an artificial environment makes it especially preferable for applications such as tourism, navigation, entertainment, advertisement, and education. In this talk, I will first give an overview of the MAR research in our HKUST-DT System and Media Lab and then I will use two systems that we have developed as examples to illustrate the research challenges that we have to face for our research. These two MAR systems are Ubii – Ubiquitous Interface for Seamless Interaction between Digital and Physical Worlds, and SharpLens – A Wearable Augmented Reality System for the Visually Impaired. I will go through them in details.

Pan Hui received his Ph.D degree from Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, and earned his MPhil and BEng both from the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, University of Hong Kong. He is currently a faculty member of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology where he directs the HKUST-DT System and Media Lab ( http://symlab.ust.hk ). He is an adjunct Professor of social computing and networking at Aalto University Finland and also served as a Distinguished Scientist for Telekom Innovation Laboratories (T-labs) Germany until 2015. Before returning to Hong Kong in 2013, he has spent several years in T-labs and Intel Research Cambridge. He has published more than 150 research papers with over 9,000 citations and has around 30 granted / filed European patents. He has founded and chaired several IEEE/ACM conferences/workshops, and has been serving on the organising and technical program committee of numerous international conferences including ACM SIGCOMM, IEEE Infocom, ICNP, SECON, MASS, Globecom, WCNC, ITC, ICWSM and WWW. He is an associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing and IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing.