ViewR: Architectural-Scale Multi-User Mixed Reality With Mobile Head-Mounted Displays

The emergence of mobile head-mounted displays with robust “inside-out” markerless tracking and video-passthrough permits the creation of novel mixed reality (MR) experiences in which architectural spaces of arbitrary size can be transformed into immersive multi-user visualisation arenas. Here we outline ViewR, an open-source framework for rapidly constructing and deploying architectural-scale multi-user MR experiences. ViewR includes tools for rapid alignment of real and virtual worlds, tracking loss detection and recovery, user trajectory visualisation and world state synchronisation between users with persistence across sessions. ViewR also provides control over the blending of the real and the virtual, specification of site-specific blending zones, and video-passthrough avatars, allowing users to see and interact with one another directly. Using ViewR, we explore the transformation of large architectural structures into immersive arenas by creating a range of experiences in various locations, with a particular focus on architectural affordances such as mezzanines, stairs, gangways and elevators. Our tests reveal that ViewR allows for experiences that would not be possible with pure virtual reality, and indicate that, with certain strategies for recovering from tracking errors, it is possible to construct large scale multi-user MR experiences using contemporary consumer virtual reality head-mounted displays.