We are proud to present the 2nd ISMAR Doctoral Consortium (DC). We are continuing to build on the success of the 1st DC at ISMAR 2012, where DC students received invaluable inputs from DC mentors to help improve their research. The goal of the DC is to create an opportunity for PhD students to present their research, discuss their current progresses and future plans, and receive constructive criticism and guidances regarding their current work, future work, and career perspectives.

In the research fields of Augmented Reality (AR) and Mixed Reality (MR), tracking and registration methods are still one of the most important topics. The tracking research field is highly active, and numerous methods appear on a regular basis. The TrakMark working group (WG) was established 2009 to create a benchmark test that permits objective and accurate evaluation of the tracking methods. This year, the workshop will cover a wide range of topics concerning AR/MR registration, tracking and benchmarking. Key areas include, but are not limited to: — Vision-based registration, camera localization — Visual SLAM, structure from motion, camera calibration, sensor fusion — Natural feature tracking, object tracking, feature detection, feature description — Comparison of methods, evaluation of methods, suggestion of new benchmarking scheme — Survey of tracking papers.

The extreme environment of a military cockpit requires a novel display technology, introduced as the virtual retinal display (VRD). A head-worn VRD generates an image by optical scanning light directly to the viewer's eye. This novel display allows the direct coupling of the display to an infrared optical head tracking system, resulting in an interactive VRD. With only minor adjustments, the interactive VRD can be used in many non-military AR and VR line-of-sight target tracking applications, such as image plane manipulations. Since the unique tracking technology shares the same aperture or scanned optical beam with the visual display, the tracking produces high accuracy and computational efficiency without the motion artifacts from video frame rate tracking. The apparatus and performance of static and dynamic 3D target tracking in 2D projection overlay are demonstrated.