Abstract:

The maturing of Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) related technologies has enabled increasingly sophisticated investigations into their applications. A recent exciting development is in the investigations into remote collaborations where geographically distributed participants can be equipped with distinct hardware configurations, such as handheld AR, immersive VR, or typical PCs, while interacting in an integrated and homogeneous environment. These are cross reality collaborations because the participants operate in a spectrum of technologically enabled realities across the augmented physical world and digital virtual spaces.

Cross reality collaborations is a new and stimulating field with many enthusiasts, especially among undergraduate students who grew up with the technology. However, even with increasingly accessible hardware, due to a lack of dedicated infrastructural support, the barrier for developing a simple remote cross reality investigative application remains significant. For this reason, explorations of related ideas are off-limit to many undergraduate students who can typically dedicate only one or two academic terms for such activities.

This paper first examines the requirements of and articulates a novel hybrid peer-to-peer (P2P) infrastructure specifically for supporting the rapid prototyping of remote cross reality ideas. These requirements are used as the design guideline for the Augmented Space Library (ASL). Following the design discussion, the paper details an implementation of the ASL where the frontend peer-to-peer Application Programming Interface (API) model is presented as an extension to Unity, an accessible and free-of-charge technology for undergraduate students, with a hidden backend server based on the GameLift service of Amazon Web Services (AWS).

The paper then describes and analyzes the results of six undergraduate student projects based on the ASL. These projects, each with two to three team members, were brainstormed, proposed, prototyped, tested, and refined in the period of one academic term. Interestingly, and coincidentally, with the current COVID-19 situation, all collaborations of the projects were carried out remotely. Though with areas for future improvements, the results from these projects demonstrated the validity of the articulated considerations and design decisions, and that ASL is indeed an effective tool for supporting undergraduate students in investigating cross reality collaboration applications.

Keywords:

Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, Cross Reality, P2P Hybrid, Network API, Unity, Rapid Prototype.