Mobile cross reality for cultural heritage

Widespread adoption of smartphones and tablets
has enabled people to multiplex their physical reality, where
they engage in face-to-face social interaction, with Web-based
social networks and apps, whilst emerging 3D Web technologies
hold promise for networks of parallel 3D virtual environments
to emerge. Although current technologies allow this multiplexing
of physical reality and 2D Web, in a situation called PolySocial
Reality, the same cannot yet be achieved with 3D content. Cross
Reality was proposed to address this issue; however so far it has
focused on the use of fixed links between physical and virtual
environments in closed lab settings, limiting investigation of the
explorative and social aspects. This paper presents an architecture
and implementation that addresses these shortcomings using a
tablet computer and the Pangolin virtual world viewer to provide
a mobile interface to a corresponding 3D virtual environment.
Motivation for this project stemmed from a desire to enable students
to interact with existing virtual reconstructions of cultural
heritage sites in tandem with exploration of the corresponding
real locations, avoiding the adverse temporal separation caused
otherwise by interacting with the virtual content only within the
classroom. The accuracy of GPS tracking emerged as a constraint
on this style of interaction.