A Collaborative Augmented Reality Platform for Interactive and Immersive Education

Augmented reality (AR) integrates virtual objects with the physical world. This technology allows us to create immersive experiences that can enhance our lives, especially through education. In combination with networking, we are able to create collaborative AR experiences which can be used to enhance the learning experience for students or people of any age. The goal of this demonstration is to show one of these systems in action. The purpose is to show students how we are able to calculate the Astronomical Unit (AU) by using the position of Venus relative to Earth and the Sun. We use AR Foundation to realize basic AR functions and rendering. The server for this multi-user demonstration is the teacher, where the teacher is able to change different parameters of the demo, which will appear on the user's device. This demonstration is made for mobile devices to reach the broadest audience. We measure the frame rates of multiple users and the round-trip time between the server and users. The frame rate is about 60 frames per second during the whole lifetime of the demo, providing a smooth and stable visual performance. The round-trip time increases from 13ms to 24ms as the number of connected users grows, which means the communication latency is less than 10ms most of the time.