A geographical display system of disaster information based on augmented reality

In the disaster countermeasures office of the local goverment, it is necessary to grasp a damage situation correctly in the situation of having got confused, and to perform quick decision-making. As the technology to realize a decision support system in such a situation, we considered using Augmented Reality. Augmented Reality allows a user to look at virtual objects or annotations in the real world as if they are really exist there. However, there is a problem in the Augmented Reality technology of a present stage. One of them is the problem by which a user's hand or body will surely be concealed with virtual objects. In the example of disaster countermeasures office, by concealing the gesture and pointing, communication between users and the usability on manipulating virtual objects are affected. In order to overcome this problem, depth of the real world from the user's viewpoint is employed. However, if the system is used in an environment including moving or deformable objects, the depth has to be measured in real time. In this paper, we propose a method of real time stereo matching by using Programmable Shader on graphics hardware for this purpose.