Collaborative Web Authoring of 3D Surfaces Using Augmented Reality on Mobile Devices

3D Surfaces are widely employed to model geometric assets (e.g., mountains on a landscape), which are used in digital animations and video games. A single surface commonly needs to be created and modified by a group of collaborators, but most of the 3D content creation applications are essentially single-user. In addition, such surfaces are visualized in 2D projections, causing confusion to new users, when imagining their shape in 3D. In this paper, we propose a novel approach based on Augmented Reality (AR) to the task of collaboratively authoring surfaces on the Web using mobile devices. We rely on AR technology to help collaborators to easily understand the shape of the surface's 3D representation, and we provide them with the basic authoring tools to intuitively modify its shape. To support real time face-to-face interaction, we implement an object sharing scheme, which according to our results is enough in practice. In this way, our approach is able to create a new online collaborative setting in which a group of collocated participants, each one using a mobile device, or connected to the Web, can concurrently modify a surface, while visualizing it in their own real environment through AR.