UC San Diego

The main purpose of collaborative virtual reality is to allow users to share information and interact with one another. Notably, most collaborative virtual reality systems rely on specially designed equipment, e.g., a head tracking system, which is often not available to average users. This work attempts to construct a prototype for collaborative virtual reality based on Android mobile devices, a more accessible and widespread technology available within the general public domain. We demonstrate information sharing and interaction through a 3D drawing application which allows users to create basic geometries and drawing lines in a 3D space. Basic geometric modification functions are also provided. To achieve pose estimation in 3D space, fiduciary marker-based camera pose estimation technique in is used. Pose estimation of this kind allows the processing speed to meet the real time rendering requirements for the 3D scene. The markers can be positioned at any point as long as the position of the markers can be estimated by our marker reconstruction program. The information exchange between users is undertaken through wireless networking, allowing the users' interactions to be shown in the same 3D space.