AR-based Modeling of 3D Objects in Multi-user Mobile Environments

Abstract

In animations and video games, Digital Elevation Maps (DEMs) are commonly used to model geometric assets, e.g., terrains on a landscape. When a DEM is edited by a group of collaborators, they are constrained to access the elevation data from their PC following a turn-taking policy, since most of the applications are essentially single-user. Furthermore, the DEM is visualized in 2D, causing some degree of confusion to new users when imagining the DEM shape in 3D. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to the collaborative modeling of DEMs on mobile devices. Our approach uses Augmented Reality (AR) to help collaborators to easily understand the DEM's 3D representation and provides them with basic editing tools to modify the DEM shape in an intuitive manner. In addition, we implement an object sharing scheme, in order to support face-to-face interaction in real-time. By means of this approach, it is possible to create an original collaboration setting, in which a group of collocated colleagues, each carrying a mobile device, can concurrently create and modify the same DEM, while visualizing it using AR-technology. As shown by our results, the workload perceived by the users of our DEM editor is small.