A Co-Located Mobile Collaborative Augmented Reality for Shared Experiences

Augmented reality (AR) has increasingly been used in varying activities by superimposing visual instructions on the workbench directly. Nevertheless, most current AR deployment is mainly first-person perspective, and it is difficult for colleagues to observe the other's operating intent directly when involving co-located users in complex environments, such as collaborative AR assembly. To this end, this paper tries to propose a co-located alignment-enabled mobile collaborative AR system. Instead of the commercial AR glass, we first establish a self- contained visual-inertial odometry system for mobile hand- held devices, and it can realize markerless pose estimation for mobile objects and enable the foundation for easy-to-deploy applications. Then, a collaborative alignment framework from multi co-located AR clients is proposed, and thus the unified global coordinate system is available for a shared immersive AR workplace on the shop floor. Finally, extensive experiments are carried out on the motion tracking and collaborative AR experience, and experimental results illustrate the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed system.