ShARe: Enabling Co-Located Asymmetric Multi-User Interaction for Augmented Reality Head-Mounted Displays

Head-Mounted Displays (HMDs) are the dominant form of enabling Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) for personal use. One of the biggest challenges of HMDs is the exclusion of people in the vicinity, such as friends or family. While recent research on asymmetric interaction for VR HMDs has contributed to solving this problem in the VR domain, AR HMDs come with similar but also different problems, such as conflicting information in visualization through the HMD and projection. In this work, we propose ShARe, a modified AR HMD combined with a projector that can display augmented content onto planar surfaces to include the outside users (non-HMD users). To combat the challenge of conflicting visualization between augmented and projected content, ShARe visually aligns the content presented through the AR HMD with the projected content using an internal calibration procedure and a servo motor. Using marker tracking, non-HMD users are able to interact with the projected content using touch and gestures. To further explore the arising design space, we implemented three types of applications (collaborative game, competitive game, and external visualization). ShARe is a proof-of-concept system that showcases how AR HMDs can facilitate interaction with outside users to combat exclusion and instead foster rich, enjoyable social interactions.