Augmented Reality-based Groupware for Editing 3D Surfaces on Mobile Devices

In this paper, we propose a novel groupware that uses Augmented Reality (AR) technology to facilitate the task of collaboratively editing 3D surfaces on mobile devices. In digital animations and video games, 3D surfaces are widely employed to model geometric assets, e.g., mountains on a landscape. However, even if a single surface commonly needs to be created and modified by a group of collaborators, most of the 3D content creation applications are essentially single-user. In addition, 3D surfaces are visualized in 2D projections, causing confusion to new users when imagining their shape in 3D. In our proposal, we use AR technology to help collaborators to easily understand the shape of the surface's 3D representation, and we provide them with the basic editing tools to intuitively modify its shape. In this way, the proposed groupware is able to support a new collaborative setting in which a group of collocated participants, each one using a mobile device, can concurrently modify a surface, while visualizing it in their own real environment by means of AR. In order to support synchronous face-to-face collaboration, we implement an object sharing scheme, which is enough in practice according to the results obtained from tests conducted with groups of collaborators.