Scaling-up AR: University Campus as a Physical-Digital Metaverse

The metaverse promises large-scale and persistent environments for users to share experiences at the intersection between physical and digital. Augmented reality (AR) is one of the primary technologies that supports blending digital content with physical environments. However, most AR applications are currently single-user and present significant constraints in terms of time and location. Scaling up the technology to large-sized environments and massively multi-user experiences thus represents one of the primary challenges to achieving such a vision. Due to these constraints, current proposals for the metaverse primarily consist of virtual worlds with little duality between physical and digital. This paper studies the feasibility of a large-scale and persistent AR experience shared among all visitors on our university campus. We define an integrated framework to enable the first AR campus metaverse by considering the nature of the various environments and the available sensing platforms.