Dieter Schmalstieg

Dieter Schmalstieg is a computer scientist who works on augmented reality, virtual reality, computer graphics, visualization and human-computer interaction. Since 2023 he has been Alexander von Humboldt Professor of Visual Computing at the University of Stuttgart in Germany, and he remains an adjunct professor at Graz University of Technology in Austria, where he was a full professor from 2004 to 2023 and head of the Institute of Computer Graphics and Vision from 2012 to 2023.

At Vienna University of Technology in the 1990s he and colleagues developed Studierstube, a multi-user augmented reality system in which several people wearing see-through head-mounted displays share the same spatially aligned 3D model. With his doctoral student Daniel Wagner he later moved augmented reality onto handheld devices: their 2003 paper described what the authors called the first stand-alone AR system with self-tracking on an unmodified personal digital assistant (PDA), and their 2008 work on natural feature tracking ran full six-degrees-of-freedom pose tracking on mobile phones. He co-wrote the textbook Augmented Reality: Principles and Practice with Tobias Höllerer (Addison-Wesley, 2016).

His honors include the IEEE Virtual Reality Technical Achievement Award (2012), the IEEE ISMAR Career Impact Award (2020) and elevation to IEEE Fellow (2021) "for contributions to augmented reality".

Reviewed 7 October 2026. Career dates, degrees, awards, editorial and conference roles checked against his CV, personal site, University of Stuttgart, Humboldt, TU Graz, IEEE, ISMAR and Academia Europaea pages; paper bibliographies checked via Crossref and claims against the original Studierstube, handheld AR and natural feature tracking papers. About review dates.

Education

Schmalstieg studied computer science at Vienna University of Technology from 1989 to 1993, finishing with a master's thesis titled "StoryBoard - A Programming Language for Computer Animation". In 1994-1995 he held a Fulbright stipend for postgraduate study in computer science at Stanford University. He returned to Vienna for his doctorate (1995-1997), with the thesis "The Remote Rendering Pipeline - Managing Geometry and Bandwidth in Distributed Virtual Environments"; the CV lists both degrees as completed with highest distinction. He received the Dipl.-Ing. in 1993, the Dr. techn. in 1997 and his habilitation in 2001, all from Vienna University of Technology.

Career

Vienna University of Technology

Schmalstieg worked at Vienna University of Technology as a teaching assistant from 1991, then as a research assistant and, from 1996 to 2001, as a university assistant (lecturer). His 2001 habilitation in practical computer science came with promotion to tenured associate professor. He spent 1998 as a visiting scientist at the Fraunhofer Center for Research in Computer Graphics in Providence, Rhode Island, and 1999 at the University of Tübingen, and from 1999 to 2003 he taught a course called "Immersion" at the Rhode Island School of Design.

Graz University of Technology

In 2004 he became full professor for computer graphics and virtual reality at Graz University of Technology. From 2008 to 2015 he directed the Christian Doppler Laboratory for Handheld Augmented Reality there, and in 2012 he became head of the Institute of Computer Graphics and Vision. The University of Stuttgart says that he significantly expanded the institute while he led it. In 2017-2018 he was a visiting scientist at Qualcomm Technologies in San Diego.

In May 2022 Snap Inc. agreed to fund a tenure-track professorship in mixed reality at the institute for six years, including assistant and postdoctoral positions. TU Graz said the new working group would develop software methods in camera technology and visual information processing at the interface of digital and physical reality; the announcement described the institute's mixed reality team as led by Schmalstieg.

University of Stuttgart

In November 2022 the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation selected Schmalstieg as one of six researchers for an Alexander von Humboldt Professorship, after a nomination by the University of Stuttgart. The prize carries EUR 5 million over five years. He moved to Stuttgart's Visualization Research Center (VISUS) in 2023 and was formally presented with the professorship in Berlin on 13 May 2024. As of October 2026 the university lists him as Alexander von Humboldt Professor of Visual Computing, vice acting director of VISUS, and director of the Department Visual Computing at the Institute for Visualization and Interactive Systems; his listed research areas there are augmented reality, virtual reality, computer graphics and situated visualization. His own site says he is still an adjunct professor at the Institute of Visual Computing at Graz University of Technology.

Research

Studierstube

Studierstube was described in Vienna University of Technology technical reports as early as March and April 1996; the April report, "'Studierstube' - An Environment for Collaboration in Augmented Reality", was written by Schmalstieg, Anton Fuhrmann, Zsolt Szalavári and Michael Gervautz. The name is the German word for the study room in which Goethe's Faust conducts his research. In the authors' design, a group of users wearing lightweight see-through head-mounted displays sees the same spatially aligned stereoscopic model while each person controls their own viewpoint and the data layers shown, so that natural face-to-face communication is preserved. The Austrian Science Fund funded the project from 1997 as "Studierstube - An augmented reality environment for scientific visualization".

A 2002 overview in Presence, co-written with colleagues including L. Miguel Encarnação of Fraunhofer CRCG in Providence, reviewed the initial collaborative system and the Personal Interaction Panel, a two-handed pen-and-pad interface first reported by Szalavári and Gervautz in 1996. It then presented an extended Studierstube built on a heterogeneous distributed architecture that let users combine augmented reality, projection displays and ubiquitous computing as needed, and that borrowed desktop elements such as multitasking and multiple windows. Construct3D, a geometry construction tool for mathematics and geometry teaching led by Hannes Kaufmann and Schmalstieg from 1999, ran on Studierstube with a stereoscopic HMD and the Personal Interaction Panel. With Gerhard Reitmayr he also developed OpenTracker, an open software architecture for reconfigurable tracking based on XML, presented at IEEE Virtual Reality 2001.

Handheld augmented reality

In "First Steps Towards Handheld Augmented Reality" (ISWC 2003), Wagner and Schmalstieg ran the marker-based ARToolKit directly on a PDA with a commercial camera. The system could optionally hand its tracking work to a server over wireless networking, and the demonstration application guided a user through an unfamiliar building. A year later Wagner, Thomas Pintaric and Schmalstieg showed The Invisible Train at SIGGRAPH 2004: players controlled virtual trains, visible only through their PDAs' video see-through displays, along a real wooden miniature railway, with the game state synchronized between devices over wireless networking. TU Wien describes it as the first real multi-user augmented reality application for handheld devices.

The framework that grew out of this work, Studierstube ES, ran self-contained on Windows CE handhelds and smartphones. Their ISMAR 2007 paper "Experiences with Handheld Augmented Reality" described its tracking and rendering components, a client-server setup for multi-user applications, and a location-based treasure-hunt game permanently installed in two Austrian museums, which the authors believed to be the largest handheld AR application to that date. At ISMAR 2008 the group presented heavily modified versions of the SIFT and Ferns feature descriptors that tracked textured planar targets from natural features on phones at up to 20 Hz. That paper won the ISMAR 2008 best paper award and the ISMAR 2018 impact paper award, and "Experiences with Handheld Augmented Reality" received the ISMAR impact paper award in 2023.

The Christian Doppler Laboratory's website said in 2011 that the team had introduced augmented reality on PDAs in 2003, had first demonstrated real-time natural feature tracking on mobile phones in 2007, and that its tracking technology had become available worldwide as part of the Qualcomm AR SDK. Qualcomm later renamed that kit Vuforia. In its 2022 announcement of the Snap professorship, TU Graz wrote that at the university "the first mobile system for 3D camera tracking was realized three years before the first smartphone came onto the market".

Later research

The University of Stuttgart and the Humboldt Foundation describe his recent work as aimed at "intelligence amplification", meaning technical systems that support people in demanding tasks such as medical diagnosis or power plant operation, and at photorealistic mixing of real and virtual imagery, using numerical optimization and machine learning to estimate photometric properties and illumination in real time. His personal site lists current research areas in real-time graphics and streaming rendering for virtual reality, situated visualization, photorealistic augmented reality, image-based modeling and rendering, 3D reconstruction and authoring for AR instructions, localization and tracking, and immersive display technology. Recent grants on his CV include an Austrian Science Fund project on real-time 3D diminished reality (InpaintFusion, 2020) and a project on the design space of situated analytics (SitA, 2022).

Book

Augmented Reality: Principles and Practice, written with Tobias Höllerer, was published by Addison-Wesley Professional on 1 June 2016. The publisher describes it as covering display and tracking technologies, computer vision and graphics, visualization, 3D interaction techniques and applications, including smartphone AR development and a case study of Qualcomm's QCAR.

Awards and honors

Year	Honor
2002	START prize, Austrian Science Fund
2007	Member of the Young Curia (Junge Kurie) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences
2012	IEEE Virtual Reality Technical Achievement Award, "in recognition for seminal technical achievement in Augmented Reality"
2013	Member of the Academia Europaea (Informatics section)
2017	Nikola Tesla Medal, Graz University of Technology
2019	Research Award of the Province of Styria
2020	IEEE ISMAR Career Impact Award
2021	IEEE Fellow, "for contributions to augmented reality"
2022	Inaugural class of the IEEE VGTC Virtual Reality Academy
2022	Alexander von Humboldt Professorship (selected November 2022)

His personal site states that he has written or co-written more than 400 peer-reviewed publications and received over twenty best paper awards and nominations. Papers on his CV that won awards at ISMAR include "Interactive Focus and Context Visualization for Augmented Reality" (best student paper, 2007), "Instant Outdoor Localization and SLAM Initialization from 2.5D Maps" (best paper, 2015) and "Video See-Through Mixed Reality with Focus Cues" (best journal paper, 2022).

Professional service

Schmalstieg was general chair of the IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR) in 2002 and program chair in 2003 and 2006, and he joined the ISMAR steering committee in 2002. He was program chair of the IEEE Virtual Reality conference in 2010 and 2013, and chaired the Eurographics Working Group on Virtual Environments from 2000 to 2011. At IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics he was an associate editor from 2008 to 2011 and associate editor in chief from 2011 to 2018. He has also been a key researcher at the VRVis research center in Vienna and the Know-Center in Graz.

See also

• Steven Feiner
• Ronald Azuma
• Hirokazu Kato
• Collaborative virtual environment