Colibri: A Toolkit for Rapid Prototyping of Networking Across Realities

We present Colibri, an open source networking toolkit for data exchange, model synchronization, and voice transmission to support rapid development of distributed cross reality research prototypes. Development of such prototypes often involves multiple heterogeneous components, which necessitates data exchange across a network. However, existing networking solutions are often unsuitable for research prototypes as they require significant development resources and may be lacking in terms of data privacy, logging capabilities, latency requirements, or supporting heterogeneous devices. In contrast, Colibri is specifically designed for networking in interactive research prototypes: Colibri facilitates the most common tasks for establishing communication between cross reality components with little to no code necessary. We describe the usage and implementation of Colibri and report on its application in three cross reality prototypes to demonstrate the toolkit’s capabilities. Lastly, we discuss open challenges to better support the creation of cross reality prototypes.