ANTS - Augmented environments

Interaction with natural or urban environments creates numerous situations where it is relevant to have access to further information that we cannot perceive by direct observation through our senses. Augmented Reality (AR) technologies allow real time superimposition of synthetic objects on real images, providing an augmented knowledge about the surrounding world. Users of an AR system can visualize the real surrounding world together with additional data generated in real time in a contextual way. This paper presents the ANTS project, which carries out the development of an AR technological infrastructure that can be used to explore physical and natural structures, namely for environmental management purposes. The system's architecture has a flexible design based on a client-server model, where several independent, but functionally interdependent modules are articulated. Therefore, modules can be moved from the server side to the client side or vice versa, according to the client processing capacity. Several applications have been developed and are also discussed in this paper.