CAVE-AR: A VR User Interface to Interactively Design, Monitor, and Facilitate AR Experiences
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In this paper we propose CAVE-AR, a novel virtual reality (VR) system for authoring custom augmented reality (AR) experiences and interacting with participating users. We introduce an innovative technique to integrate different representations of the world, mixing geographical information, architectural features, and sensor data, allowing us to understand precisely how users are behaving within the AR experience. By taking advantage of this technique to "mix realities", our VR application provides the designer with tools to create and modify a AR application, even while other people are in the midst of using it. Our VR application further lets the designer track how users are behaving, preview what they are currently seeing, and interact with them through different channels. This enables new possibilities which range from simple debugging and testing to more complex forms of centralized task control, such as placing a virtual avatar in the AR experience to guide a user. In addition to describing details of how we create effective representations of the real-world for enhanced AR experiences and our novel interaction modalities, we introduce two use cases demonstrating the potential of our approach. The first is an AR experience that enables users to discover historical information during an urban tour along the Chicago Riverwalk; the second is a novel scavenger hunt that places virtual objects within a real-world environment to facilitate solving complex multi-user puzzles. In both cases, the ability to develop and test the AR experience remotely greatly enhanced the design process and the novel interaction techniques greatly enhanced overall user experience.
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