Abstract
Virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) applications are very diffuse nowadays. Moreover, recent technology innovations led to the diffusion of commercial head-mounted displays for immersive VR: users can enjoy entertainment activities that fill their visual fields, experiencing the sensation of physical presence in these virtual immersive environments. Even if AR and VR are mostly used separately, they can be effectively combined to provide a multi-user shared environment (SE), where two or more users perform some specific tasks in a cooperative or competitive way, providing a wider set of interactions and use cases compared to immersive VR alone. However, due to the differences between the two technologies, it is difficult to develop SEs offering a similar experience for both AR and VR users. This paper presents Harmonize, a novel framework to deploy applications based on SEs with a comparable experience for both AR and VR users. Moreover, the framework is hardware-independent, and it has been designed to be as much extendable to novel hardware as possible. An immersive game has been designed to test and to evaluate the validity of the proposed framework. The assessment of the system through the System Usability Scale questionnaire and the Game Experience Questionnaire shows a positive evaluation.
Highlights
Augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) applications are very diffuse nowadays due to their ability to enhance and to simplify human tasks in many fields
This paper presents Harmonize, a novel framework to deploy applications based on shared environments for VR and AR users
The proposed framework has been tested on a use case based on see-through AR displays and VR head-mounted displays (HMD) with motion controllers
Summary
Augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) applications are very diffuse nowadays due to their ability to enhance and to simplify human tasks in many fields. Milgram and Kishino first defined AR, VR and their relation in the reality–virtuality continuum in 1994 (Milgram et al 1994). A VR environment is one in which participants are immersed in a synthetic world, which can be either realistic or fantastic. AR environments consist of virtual objects anchored to specific positions in the real world, and they are aimed at “augmenting natural feedback to the operator with simulated cues” (Milgram et al 1994). Immersive environments (IEs) are simulations that fill the user’s visual field, giving the sensation of physical presence (Getchell et al 2011; Rubio-Tamayo et al 2017). The term immersive entertainment defines all the entertainment
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