Eurographics Symposium on Virtual Environments (2004) S. Coquillart, M. Göbel (Editors) Authoring of Mixed Reality Applications including Multi-Marker Calibration for Mobile Devices Jürgen Zauner, Michael Haller Department of Media Technologies and Design, Upper Austria University of Applied Sciences, Austria Abstract Creative and innovative people have good ideas for new kind of Mixed Reality applications. Applications designed by artists for example could enrich the exhibitions of modern museums. Developing such an application is a complex task, which nowadays is solved by software engineers. A component based authoring tool allows artists to develop applications by their own. We have developed an authoring tool, which integrates an user-friendly and intuitive calibration tool for a multi-marker detection system. We stabilize the orientation and position output of the marker tracking system by a filtering mechanism. We have decided to use a mobile device as the application platform to provide users a very flexible system. 1. Introduction Augmented Reality (AR) and Mixed Reality (MR) are be- coming more and more popular techniques. MR technology has been exploited in the medical, military, and most of all in the entertainment field. The use of Mixed Reality enhances users’ perception and their interaction with the real world. It allows new ways for interaction and communication of the visitors with the objects of an exhibition. In the Virtual Showcase project, for example, the visitors get a 3D graphi- cal augmentation of real objects placed inside a glass hous- ing [BFSE01]. Other AR exhibition examples can be found in the museum of the Ars Electronica Center of Linz, where the users get fascinated of this new technology [AEC04]. Figure 1 depicts a possible scenario of a museum’s visitor using AR technology: by using a Tablet-PC with a mounted camera, the system recognizes the position and orientation of the visitor and it presents 3D content on the display ac- cordingly. In this example, the tracking is solved by using a multi-marker detection setup. Most of the Ars Electronica Center installations are not exclusively authored by artists, but programmed or scripted by computer scientists or by experts with programming skills. Moreover, an apparently small modification of the ex- isting AR installation can cause a lot of modification tasks during the application setup. For instance the change of the tracking setup yields a dramatic modification of the exist- ing code. Besides, a lot of creative and innovative people are Figure 1: The user gets more detailed information pointing to one of the mounted markers. not able to implement their brilliant ideas due to the lack of programming skills. An authoring tool solves this prob- lem, because it enables people to produce new applications or maintain existing applications very fast and with a min- imum of initial training. Indeed, artists and designers can directly work with the application and experiment with the new AR technology without the help of computer scientists. Furthermore, designers are often involved in virtual pro- c  The Eurographics Association 2004.