COLLABORATIVE AUGMENTED REALITY – A SURVEY
COLLABORATIVE AUGMENTED REALITY – A SURVEY

Summary/Abstract: In the past few years, technology breakthroughs have made Augmented Reality (AR) applications more user friendly and accessible than ever. New AR technologies show great promise and potential to influence and enhance the activities related to a wide range of areas, such as education, military industry, entertainment, sports or medicine and surgical training. In complementarity with Virtual Reality, AR is now considered to be the future of human-computer interaction, by revolutionizing the way information is presented and transforming the surroundings into one broad user interface. In particular, AR systems will soon play an important role in communication and collaboration, creating innovative collaborative environments that allow multiple users to interact simultaneously. Hybrid interfaces that combine AR technology with existing telecommunication techniques provide immense power and freedom in multi-participant settings where the physical and virtual worlds blend perfectly and form a mixed reality. Their main objectives are to improve the cooperation through augmented face-to-face interactions, to enrich the remote collaboration by virtually co-locating the participants and to augment physical spaces with new modalities of interaction between people. Using latest AR technologies, applications can provide unique collaborative experiences for all domains, supporting new means of communication and socialization and making working together very effective. This paper aims to present a survey on collaborative augmented reality and its potential in various contexts. It thoroughly reviews existing collaborative AR systems in areas like those mentioned above, identifying their accomplishments as well as limitations, and highlighting the most recent discoveries and future trends in the field.

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