Towards large scale high fidelity collaborative augmented reality

In recent years, there has been an increasing amount of Collaborative Augmented Reality (CAR) experiences, classifiable by the deployed scale and the fidelity of the experience. In this paper, we create HoloRoyale, the first large scale high fidelity (LSHF) CAR experience. We do this by first exploring the LSHF CAR design space, drawing on technical implementations and design aspects from AR and video games. We then create and implement a software architecture that improves the accuracy of synchronized poses between multiple users. Finally, we apply our target experience and technical implementation to the explored design space. A core design component of HoloRoyale is the use of visual repellers as crowd control elements to guide players away from undesired areas. To evaluate the effectiveness of the employed visual repellers in a LSHF CAR context we conducted a user study, deploying HoloRoyale in a 12.500 m² area. The results from the user study suggest that visual repellers are effective crowd control elements that do not significantly impact the user's overall immersion. Overall our main contribution is the exploration of a design space, discussing several means to address the challenges of LSHF CAR, the creation of a system capable of LSHF CAR interactions along with an experience that has been fitted to the design space, and an indepth study that verifies a key design aspect for LSHF CAR. As such, our work is the first to explore the domain of LSHF CAR and provides insight into designing experiences in other AR domains.