LIRKIS Global Collaborative Virtual Environments: Current State and Utilization Perspective

Abstract

Recent advances in the field of web technologies, including the increasing support of virtual reality hardware, have allowed for shared virtual environments, reachable by just entering a URL in a browser. One contemporary solution that provides such a shared virtual reality is LIRKIS Global Collaborative Virtual Environments (LIRKIS G-CVE). It is a web-based software system, built on top of the A-Frame and Networked-Aframe frameworks. This paper describes LIRKIS G-CVE and introduces its two original components. The first one is the Smart-Client Interface, which turns smart devices, such as smartphones and tablets, into input devices. The advantage of this component over the standard way of user input is demonstrated by a series of experiments. The second component is the Enhanced Client Access layer, which provides access to positions and orientations of clients that share a virtual environment. The layer also stores a history of connected clients and provides limited control over the clients. The paper also outlines an ongoing experiment aimed at an evaluation of LIRKIS G-CVE in the area of virtual prototype testing.

Experimental Performance Evaluation of Enhanced User Interaction Components for Web-Based Collaborative Extended Reality

“…Just by providing a link to the environment and a set of instructions, arbitrary users can utilize the environment in a proper way. A promising scenario, outlined in [10], is a testing of virtual prototypes of autonomous devices. In such case, a shared scene is used as a testing area, where one client app takes the role of the tested prototype and real persons, using their client apps, act as testers.…”

“…To extend the functionality of A-Frame and NAF and address some of their limitations, new components were proposed and evaluated by the authors. The components, together with a selection of virtual environments (scenes), constitute a platform called LIRKIS Global-Collaborative Virtual Environments (G-CVE) [8][9][10]. An instance of LIRKIS G-CVE, with all the components described and evaluated here, is available at https://lirkisgcve.herokuapp.com/ (accessed on 22 April 2021).…”

“…The original contribution of this paper dwells in a performance evaluation of three of the proposed components under different loads. The first proposed component, called Enhanced Client Access (ECA) [10], extends NAF with the ability to monitor and control client apps sharing a virtual scene. The second one is 6-DoF SMC (Smartphone Motion Capture) [9], which addresses the lack of Six Degrees of Freedom (6-DoF) motion tracking for smartphones.…”