The number of papers per institution can be easily found. The ten institutions with the largest number of published papers by the top 160 AR researchers are shown below, as well as the average number of publications per researcher at those institions. Interesting, the top nine institutions are all outside of the USA, showing the dominance of AR research in Europe, Asia and Australia.

Table 2: Universities with the most AR publications by top AR researchers

This of course is related to the publication record of the individual academics, so here is the list of the ten AR academic researchers publishing the most papers. This shows that there a number of star researchers, who publish a lot of papers in AR, even if their institution doesn’t appear on the top ten universities list. For example, Hideo Saito (Keio University), Blair MacIntyre (Georgia Tech.) and Steve Feiner (Columbia University), are all outstanding in the field.

Table 3: Top academic publishers in AR

However, sometimes it’s not the number of papers that are published, but the impact of the research. This can be measured by the author’s h-index, a number associated with how many times their publications are cited. The table shows the top 15 AR academic researchers in the world by Scopus h-index. Nearly half of the researchers on this list come from European universities, with only four from the USA.

Table 4: Most impactful AR researchers in the World

Summary

In this post we’ve summarized where AR research is happening arond the World. As can be seen, most AR research in terms of publication output by top researhcers is happening outside the USA, in China, Japan, Europe and Australia. In these countries there are fewer universities doing AR research, but they tend to have a larger number of top AR researchers. However, there are still a number of star researchers doing great research by themselves at institutions in the US and elsewhere.

Limitations

However, there are a number of limitations with the analysis. First this is based entirely on Scopus data. Scopus captures journal publications of researchers, but may not be as accurate as Google Scholar in capturing the entire research output of a particular researcher. For example, Scopus lists Steve Feiner as having 70 AR publications (in May 2018) with an h-index of 40, but Google Scholar records him as having 463 outputs with an h-index of 74. However, Scopus is easier to use to get an list of top AR researchers.

A second limitation is in the counting of AR publicatons per institution. Most publications have more than one author, and so some AR publications may be counted more than once, depending on the number of authors. I haven’t had time to check each publication for author overlap.

Finally, this is a snapshot of AR academic reserach in May 2018, but the picture could change drammatically if some of the AR researchers moved around. The numbers of top researchers at each university is relatively low (typically less than 4 or 5), so one researcher leaving for another institution could easily change the institution ranking in table 2.

References

[1] Sutherland, I. E. (1968, December). A head-mounted three dimensional display. In Proceedings of the December 9–11, 1968, fall joint computer conference, part I (pp. 757–764). ACM.

[2] Feiner, S., MacIntyre, B., & Seligmann, D. (1992, May). Annotating the real world with knowledge-based graphics on a see-through head-mounted display. In proceedings of Graphics Interface (Vol. 92, pp. 78–85).