Real-time Collaboration Between Mixed Reality Users in Geo-referenced Virtual Environment

TL;DR

This paper presents a real-time cross-platform collaboration system enabling outdoor AR and VR users to interact within a geo-referenced virtual environment, addressing challenges of outdoor tracking and dynamic content sharing.

Contribution

It introduces a novel GPS-enhanced VSLAM localization method for outdoor AR, facilitating seamless cross-platform collaboration in geo-referenced virtual environments.

Findings

Successful real-time collaboration between outdoor AR and VR users.

Effective localization of AR users using GPS and VSLAM integration.

Dynamic geotagged content sharing in outdoor mixed reality environments.

Abstract

Collaboration using mixed reality technology is an active area of research, where significant research is done to virtually bridge physical distances. There exist a diverse set of platforms and devices that can be used for a mixed-reality collaboration, and is largely focused for indoor scenarios, where, a stable tracking can be assumed. We focus on supporting collaboration between VR and AR users, where AR user is mobile outdoors, and VR user is immersed in true-sized digital twin. This cross-platform solution requires new user experiences for interaction, accurate modelling of the real-world, and working with noisy outdoor tracking sensor such as GPS. In this paper, we present our results and observations of real-time collaboration between cross-platform users, in the context of a geo-referenced virtual environment. We propose a solution for using GPS measurement in VSLAM to localize the AR user in an outdoor environment. The client applications enable VR and AR user to collaborate across the heterogeneous platforms seamlessly. The user can place or load dynamic contents tagged to a geolocation and share their experience with remote users in real-time.