Long Distance Distribution of Educational Augmented Reality Applications

For distance education utilizing shared Virtual or Augmented Reality (VR/AR) applications, reliable network distributionof educational content is of prime importance. In this paper we summarize the development of softwarecomponents enabling stable and reliable distribution of an existing educational AR application for geometry education.Our efforts focus on three main areas: (1) For long distance distribution of Open Inventor scene graphs,throughout a wide area IP network, a TCP based network protocol was implemented in Distributed Open Inventor.(2) A tracking middleware was extended to support sending tracking data unicast instead or in addition to sendingmulticast messages. (3) Multiple adaptations in our geometry application were required to improve scalability, robustnessand reliability. We present an early evaluation with high school students in a distant learning, distributedHMD setup and highlight final results.