Tutorial: Building interoperable location-based augmented reality with the Open AR Cloud

Tutorial Abstract:

This tutorial provides an overview of location-based augmented reality and the spatial web, their use cases, the ecosystem, and challenges related to the lack of interoperability between proprietary solutions.

The Open AR Cloud Association promotes an open spatial web and develops open-source components to achieve this goal.

Participants will learn about these components, their current state, future steps, and gain access to the toolset and proof-of-concept use cases to to build their own location-based AR experiences anchored to the real world.

Ubicomp 2025 Tutorial Schedule (tentative)

Gain knowledge about the technology stack of a spatial web required for interoperable publishing, discovery and consumption of content anchored to a ‘digital twin’ of real-world locations and how it relates to other technologies such as 5G, edge computing and smart sensors.

The schedule is planned for 4 hours (including a coffee break) with the following sessions:

  • Spatial web basics (15 min): Vision, state of the art, applications, challenges.

  • Platform components (30 min): An overview of the platform, spatial search and discovery, content authoring, content placement, and positioning basics.

  • GeoPose (15 min): Geo reference systems, the OGC GeoPose standard for universal shared reference frame between different AR clouds, 3D visualisation, pose streams.

  • Visual positioning (45 min): This session covers visual positioning systems (VPS), technical background, and why open-source solutions and interoperability between these systems need to be established. It also includes building a point-cloud ‘digital twin’ and 3D map of a real-world location. We will include an introduction to Immersal and Augmented City solutions, an open GeoPoseProtocol, and Nokia’s Open VPS implementation.

  • Coffee break (20 min)

  • Reality modeling (20 mins): The need for machine-readable digital representations of the world, reality modeling language, use cases.

  • Client applications (35 mins): We have a WebXR-based and a Unity-based client. In this hands-on tutorial, we focus on WebXR, which is free for everyone and can run in a browser without installation. We show the client architecture and how it can be modified and extended for our own experiments.

  • Content and discovery (15 mins): Available content types, content authoring and placement, point of interest (PoI) service, OGC PoI standard, etc. A demonstration of interoperable content placement between a Unity client (MyGeoVerse by XR-Masters) and a WebXR client (spARcl by OARC).

  • Advanced features (15 mins): IoT sensor streams, 3D sounds, point clouds, photorealistic models, message brokers.

  • Hands-on tutorial (30 mins): We plan to walk through the design and implementation of a location-based game, for example, a collaborative virtual block world builder

  • Outlook and wrap-up (10 mins)