Be There, Be Together, Be Streamed! AR Scenic Live-Streaming for an Interactive and Collective Experience

Scenic Live-Streaming (SLS), capturing real-world scenic sites from fixed cameras without streamers, combines scene immersion and the social and real-time characteristics of live-streaming into a unique experience. However, existing SLS affords limited audience interactions to engage them in a collective experience compared to many other live-streaming genres. It is also difficult for SLS to recreate important but intangible constituents of in-person trip experiences, such as cultural activities. To offer a more interactive, engaging, and meaningful experience, we propose ARSLS (Augmented Reality Scenic Live-Streaming). Culturally grounded AR objects with awareness of the live-streamed environment can be overlaid over camera views to provide additional interactive features while maintaining consistency with the live-streamed scene. To explore the design space of this new medium, we developed an ARSLS prototype for a famous landscape in China. A preliminary study (N=15) provided initial insights for ARSLS design.