Mixed Reality Tabletop (MRT): A Low-Cost Teleconferencing Framework for Mixed-Reality Applications

Today’s technology enables a rich set of virtual and mixedreality applications and provides a degree of connectivity and interactivity beyond that of traditional teleconferencing scenarios. In this paper, we present the Mixed-Reality Tabletop (MRT), an example of a teleconferencing framework for networked mixed reality in which real and virtual worlds coexist and users can focus on the task instead of computer interaction. For example, students could use real-world objects to participate in physical simulations such as orbital motion, collisions, and fluid flow in a common virtual environment. Our framework isolates the lowlevel system details from the developer and provides a simple programming interface for developing novel applications in as little as a few minutes, using low-cost hardware. We discuss our implementation complete with methods of hand and object tracking, user interface, and example applications focused on remote teaching and learning.