ARGarden: 3D outdoor landscape design using handheld augmented reality with multi-user interaction

Abstract

Augmented Reality (AR) is a technology to display the virtual object by overlaying on the physical marker in the real environment. Nowadays, the handheld device becomes a trend in AR since it has high processing power and compatible with the AR system. However, most of the AR applications did not fully support the interaction from multiple users for the collaborative AR interface. Therefore, this research aim is to develop multi-user interaction for collaborative handheld AR. There are a few phases involved to design and develop the collaborative AR application for the handheld device called ARGarden. All the interaction that has been done for the virtual object transformation such as translation, rotation and scaling can be seen by the other users, and this data is synchronized by using a network protocol. Then, a queue system is implemented for the multi-user interaction to allow the virtual object can only be selected by one user at one time, and the other users must wait for their turn. The significance of this research is all the method that has been implemented for the ARGarden can be applied in different fields such as simulation, modelling, medical and education.