Engineers implementing AR in commercial deployments, and researchers evaluating potential benefits or performance of their innovations, need to:
- Integrate their AR-enabling technologies with existing IT architectures,
- Offer their partners, customers and employees a range of acceptable options from which they can choose when developing or preparing to use AR-enabling components in a wide range of use cases and under diverse constraints and,
- Be assured that whatever tools are used to create AR experiences, the target audiences will be able to access the experiences, regardless of their choice of display or network.
Unfortunately, many current AR systems are vertically integrated. This means:
- Their components and APIs are controlled by a single vendor,
- A customer or researcher is unable to combine AR-enabling components and data from a variety of sources,
- Replacing proprietary components, to deploy or test their latest innovations is highly challenging if possible at all.
The lack of interoperability among components and data is an obstacle to the study of AR technologies, and to achieving integration and wide scale adoption of AR. In her ISMAR2021 keynote address, Dr. Mar Gonzales Franco (Microsoft) shared a survey conducted on Twitter on Sept 30 2021. Dr. Franco explained why she agrees with those who responded that lack of interoperability is the biggest problem facing everyone who wants to see AR and the Metaverse advance.
By attending this tutorial, attendees are better informed about:
- Benefits of interoperability
- Different options to achieve interoperability within AR systems and with existing IT infrastructure.
The tutorial also provides a presentation about the most current status of international standards for AR interoperability.