Patent ID: 7796155

Claim:
A real-time, group interactive, augmented-reality area monitoring system, suitable for enhancing the enjoyment of entertainment events, the system comprising: a sensor data acquisition system for receiving sensor data, in real-time, from a plurality of data acquisition sensors disposed about an area to be monitored; a plurality of display centers communicatively coupled with the sensor data acquisition system for receiving sensor data therefrom, with each display center further comprising: an input for receiving input from a user; a sensor selector for allowing a user to select at least one data acquisition sensor from which to display sensor data; an interaction interface for communicating, in real-time, with other display centers to allow a user of a display center to interact with users of other display centers; a local data augmenting system for locally augmenting the display of the sensor data with user input; and an interface for connecting the display center with a display device; and an object recognition system for receiving sensor data from the data acquisition system and for recognizing a segment of the sensor data; wherein the object recognition system comprises a model-extractor for extracting spatially-registered geometric models of objects present in the sensor data; a central data augmenting system coupled with the sensor data acquisition system for centrally augmenting sensor data from the data acquisition sensors before the sensor data is received by the display centers; wherein the object recognition system augments the sensor data with information regarding the recognized segment for provision to the central data augmenting system; a recognition-information database connected with the object recognition system and with the central data augmenting system so that a user may select an object to be recognized so that the system automatically recognizes the object selected and provides information regarding the object from the recognition information database; a data-marker for marking the sensor data received from the data acquisition sensors, wherein the data acquisition sensors include at least one of a video camera capturing video frames, an audio recording sensor, and a video/audio camera, wherein the video/audio camera records video signals and audio signals concurrently, wherein the video camera is oriented at a line-of-sight (LOS) orientation viewing angle during a video frame, and where the data-marker marks the sensor data received from a video camera with a time-tag corresponding to a video frame and with the line-of-sight (LOS) orientation angle of the video camera at the video frame; and an interaction-selector for allowing a user of a display center to selectively choose which other display centers to interact with, and wherein a user of a selected to interact with display center may choose to cancel the interaction with a particular display center at any time.