Professors Hirokazu Kato and Mark Billinghurst, two of ARToolworks’ founders, were today recognized for their unique contribution to Augmented Reality when they were awarded the ’10 Year Lasting Impact Award’ at IEEE ISMAR.
The award was given for the “significant academic and commercial impact of ARToolKit” and referenced the presentation of one of Kato’s and Billinghurst’s early academic papers – “Marker Tracking and HMD Calibration for a Video-based Augmented Reality Conferencing System” – that was presented to the International Workshop on Augmented Reality (IWAR) in 1999.
The Award Panel said “As the most widely cited ARToolKit paper, the research presented in this paper brought AR within the reach of countless individuals and helped make the field what it is today”.
ARToolKit was developed by Professors Kato and Billinghurst whilst at the HITLab at the University of Washington and was first shown in public at the Siggraph Exhibition in 1999. ARToolKit was subsequently released as an open source product on Sourceforge in 2004 and has since been downloaded more than 500,000 times. Commercial licensing and development of professional products based on ARToolKit is managed by ARToolworks.
Commenting on the Award, Ben Vaughan, CEO of ARToolworks, said:
“I am delighted that Mark and Hiro have received this thoroughly deserved Award from their peers. They are two of the best known individuals in the field and by releasing their proprietary technology into the public domain, they have been largely responsible for creating the AR industry as we know it today.”
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