Today, I looked at a research paper from 2005 entitled Towards Massively Multi-user Augmented Reality on Handheld Devices. The Austrian team behind it was one of the first groups to try and get away from the cumbersome augmented reality setups that the field began with, including the backpacks, wearable desktop computers, goggles, etc. They identified three devices that are generally more accessible and socially fitting: PDAs, phones, and tablets. At the time of their research, 3D acceleration and high processing power was not as readily available as today, and powerful phones and tablets were scarce and extremely expensive, so they chose the PDA with an attachable camera add-on as the platform to conduct their research.
(system architecture, image from the paper)
The architecture they chose is displayed above. The only two components they had to build from scratch were PocketKnife, a hardware abstraction layer designed to be platform-independent and ease the development of graphical applications on mobile devices, and KLIMT, a renderer similar to OpenGL (which was not available for mobile devices at the time of the research). Every other system component was open-source, including the tracking software (OpenTracker), scene-graph renderer (Studierstube), and distributed networking framework (ACE); the team just put the pieces together in the right way.
(Invisible Train game, image from paper)
To actually test and evaluate this system, they built a game-like application (pictured above) that was designed for easy use by the general public, including children. Essentially, it was a multi-player train simulator where participants could choose to play collaboratively (trying to avoid hitting each others' trains) or competitively (trying to crash into each other). They launched the game in four locations simultaneously and supported several thousands of users over multiple days, which was an order of magnitude larger test group than had been previously used in AR research (according to the team). They gathered very informal evaluative information from the participants in the form of questionnaires and interviews, and on the whole there was a positive response. They felt they achieved a landmark goal in the quest of "AR anytime, anywhere".
Speaking from a present-day view, this research effort does seem to be a big step in the right direction, as there have been AR applications built since then on the concept of a massive user-base. It is also a positive takeaway for our own project that they managed to build this application using so many existing open-source components.
Wagner, Daniel; Pintaric, Thomas; Ledermann, Florian; Schmalstieg, Dieter; "Towards Massively Multi-user Augmented Reality on Handheld Devices," Pervasive Computing, 2005. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pp.77-95.
doi: 10.1007/11428572_13
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/11428572_13
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/11428572_13
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