Canadian Company Unveils Evolutionary Path to Augmented Reality at NATO Science Conference

Kongsberg Gallium, an Ottawa-based geospatial systems software, announced today that their Technology Officer, Gilles Bessens will be presenting a paper on the evolution of next-gen augmented reality at a NATO Science and Technology Organization (STO) symposium in Prague, CZ this October.

 The NATO Science and Technology Organization is made up of representatives from military organizations, academia, and defense technology companies from NATO member countries. They have commissioned a working group to explore ways to leverage technologies like Augmented Reality to help improve situational awareness and the survivability of combat vehicles and their crews.

Augmented Reality is an emerging technology that overlays a digital model of the world over a live video feed to “augment” reality with a composite view providing additional information that’s not visible in the original image.  This can range from relatively simple applications like enhancing visibility in smoky or foggy environments, or displaying waypoints, objectives, and other navigational data for the driver of a vehicle to more complex tasks like identifying parts and providing assembly and service instructions to a technician working on a complex machine.

Augmented Reality has been a staple of science fiction movies and video games for years, but getting it to work effectively on a large scale in the real world is more difficult, since tiny variations between the computer model of the world and the real world can cause augmented objects to be slightly misaligned.  Registration errors that would be unnoticeable in a small space can render the technology useless when it’s deployed over a large area. This problem is complicated even more when the video you are trying to augment is coming from a moving platform like a vehicle moving over rough terrain.

Mr. Bessens will be addressing some of these issues in his presentation, which is about how the different components to a video augmentation solution have been evolving independently over the past few years.

Mr. Bessens, who has worked in academia, says that what many of the symposium attendees will likely be interested in hearing about is how Kongsberg Gallium has been implementing these innovations in real-world deployments and how it intends to continue to address the remaining challenges.

” I am excited to share our discoveries with the community to stimulate conversations and get feedback from the long standing experts in the field of augmented reality”, said Mr. Bessens. “While we are keen to investigate and pursue realizable implementation, we welcome new unexplored areas and especially future potential ideas to feed the roadmaps to deliver the solutions our war fighters need and deserve.”  

Two of the current  Augmented Reality technology projects Mr. Bessens will be highlighting in his talk include a partnership between Kongsberg Defense Systems and Avinor Inc. to develop a solution for remote control of tower services at a number of airports from one location, and a project funded by the Build in Canada Innovation Program (BCIP) to develop  Augmented Reality enhancement for the drivers and commanders of armored fighting vehicles, (AFVs).