Unfortunately, many current AR systems are vertically-integrated: their components and APIs are specified by and under the control of a single vendor. Many data formats and encodings for AR experiences are also proprietary. The lack of interoperability among components and data for experiences is an obstacle to the study of experimental or emerging AR technologies, and to achieving integration and wide scale adoption of AR.
All researchers and developers of AR-enabling technologies, components and solutions seeking to test performance of innovations in real world contexts can benefit from greater knowledge about interoperability. Those who seek to innovate and to integrate their AR-enabling technologies with existing IT architectures may choose to adopt standards to achieve interoperability. Knowledge about the approaches to interoperability and an overview of available standards is provided in an ISMAR21 tutorial (see Introduction to AR Interoperability and Standards Tutorial).
This workshop provides opportunities for participants to learn how to implement interoperability in AR components and to have “hands on” experiences with sample data sets and/or compliance testing suites to validate their support of a standard or protocol.
Those studying the usability and adoption of AR by integrating novel and proven AR experiences into existing in pilot or large scale deployments will also benefit from learning about open source libraries and international standards. If industrial partners participate, they may obtain expert support when implementing one or more of the proposed standards in their codebase, or testing compliance.