Is Native Naïve? Comparing Native Game Engines and WebXR as Immersive Analytics Development Platforms.

Native game engines have long been the 3-D development platform of choice for research in mixed and augmented reality. For this reason, they have also been adopted in many immersive visualization and immersive analytics systems and toolkits. However, with the rapid improvements of WebXR and related open technologies, this choice may not always be optimal for future visualization research. In this article, we investigate common assumptions about native game engines versus WebXR and find that while native engines still have an advantage in many areas, WebXR is rapidly catching up and is superior for many immersive analytics applications.

Walled gardens: apps and data as barriers to augmenting reality.

For augmented reality (AR) to reach its potential, AR content from multiple distinct sources must be simultaneously displayed in a more unified manner than is possible given today's application-centric environments. AR browsers and AR-enabled Web browsers point toward the functionalities that OSs must incorporate to fully support AR content. Also, application developers need richer forms of content describing the physical world and the objects in it. Standards such as ARML (Augmented Reality Markup Language) 2.0 have begun providing the glue needed to bind AR content to the physical world.

An evaluation of graphical context as a means for ameliorating the effects of registration error.

An ongoing research problem in Augmented Reality (AR) is to improve tracking and display technology in order to minimize registration errors. However, perfect registration is not always necessary for users to understand the intent of an augmentation. This paper describes the results of an experiment to evaluate the effects of registration error in a Lego block placement task and the effectiveness of graphical context at ameliorating these effects. Three types of registration error were compared: no error, fixed error and random error. These three errors were evaluated with no context present and some graphical context present. The results of this experiment indicated that adding graphical context to a scene in which some registration error is present can allow a person to effectively operate in such an environment, in this case completing the Lego block placement task with a reduced number of errors made and in a shorter amount of time.