Development of an AR chart tool for understanding invisible physical phenomena

The purpose of this study was to develop a tool to overlay a 3D chart on a real measurement field by using ARToolKit library and AR SDK. The tool was also designed to receive measurement data from any device as TCP/IP packets sent through a LAN. The tool is capable of drawing five types of charts; bar, bubble, red-line, spectrum-line and 3D-area. The tool requires a conventional PC, a USB camera, and an AR tag printed on a paper. The AR tag is laid on the measurement area and is recognized as the base level from where to draw the chart. 3D CG objects of the charts are overlaid on the images captured by the USB camera through recognition of the AR tag. A sample code was also prepared to manage DAQ data. The sample code for Windows OS can send the data as CSV text data via TCP/IP to the AR chart tool.