PolySocial reality for education: addressing the vacancy problem with Mobile Cross Reality

Widespread adoption of mobile communications devices has led to people multiplexing their grounded reality, where they engage in face-to-face social interaction, with Web-based social networks and apps; concurrently emerging 3D Web technologies hold promise for networks of rich, parallel 3D synthetic environments to emerge. Current technologies allow the 2D Web to be multiplexed with grounded reality, resulting in PolySocial Reality, however 3D platforms suffer from the vacancy problem when the same is attempted. Cross Reality has been proposed to address this problem; but previous instantiations of the concept have used fixed links between grounded and synthetic environments in closed lab settings, limiting their utility for investigating PolySocial Reality. This paper presents an architecture and implementation to address this shortcoming, using a tablet computer and the Pangolin virtual world client to provide a mobile, location and orientation aware interface to spatially equivalent 3D synthetic environments. A use case is investigated in which this implementation is applied to improve upon accompanying materials at cultural heritage sites, augmenting traditional guide books and audio tours used by the general public and educational visits, with accuracy of GPS emerging as a constraint on modality of interaction possible. - See more at: http://summit.immersiveeducation.org/iED-2013-program.html#PAPERS