Abstract
Augmented Reality (AR) and Mixed Reality (MR) devices have evolved significantly in the last years, providing immersive AR/MR experiences that allow users to interact with virtual elements placed on the real-world. However, to make AR/MR devices reach their full potential, it is necessary to go further and let them collaborate with the physical elements around them, including the objects that belong to the Internet of Things (IoT). Unfortunately, AR/MR and IoT devices usually make use of heterogeneous technologies that complicate their intercommunication. Moreover, the implementation of the intercommunication mechanisms requires involving specialized developers with have experience on the necessary technologies. To tackle such problems, this article proposes the use of a framework that makes it easy to integrate AR/MR and IoT devices, allowing them to communicate dynamically and in real time. The presented AR/MR-IoT framework makes use of standard and open-source protocols and tools like MQTT, HTTPS or Node-RED. After detailing the inner workings of the framework, it is illustrated its potential through a practical use case: a smart power socket that can be monitored and controlled through Microsoft HoloLens AR/MR glasses. The performance of such a practical use case is evaluated and it is demonstrated that the proposed framework, under normal operation conditions, enables to respond in less than 100 ms to interaction and data update requests.
Highlights
The Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm has already been considered for multiple applications in fields like smart appliances [1,2], precision agriculture [3], smart healthcare [4,5] or smart buildings and cities [6]
Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT), but, they are currently not appropriate for implementing Augmented Reality (AR)/Mixed Reality (MR)-IoT applications: such applications often require sending large amounts of information that are difficult to handle through MQTT and similar IoT protocols, which have been designed for managing small payloads
This article presented an AR/MR-IoT framework that eases the integration of AR/MR and IoT
Summary
The Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm has already been considered for multiple applications in fields like smart appliances [1,2], precision agriculture [3], smart healthcare [4,5] or smart buildings and cities [6]. In order to allow AR/MR applications to interact with the surrounding IoT devices, it is necessary to develop communication mechanisms that enable exchanging data in the same ’language’, so that the involved devices understand each other. To tackle the aforementioned problems, this article includes the following contributions It is faced the challenge of interconnecting very different types of systems by proposing an AR/MR-IoT framework that allows for integrating AR/MR platforms and IoT devices through the use of open-source standard communication protocols. Such a framework enables implementing ubiquitous and scalable applications in a flexible way and eases their configuration.
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