A Software Architecture for Distributed AR Applications

The recent advances in hardware technology expanded the scope of Augmented Reality applications to mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones. Given their limited battery resources, distributed computing becomes a tempting approach to develop AR applications. Although frameworks that support the development of distributed AR systems exist, they are mostly complex in their nature. In this article, we present a software architecture that mainly targets distributed AR systems. As a proof of concept, we developed three different applications based on this architecture. The applications use different devices such as smartphones, webcams and head mounted displays (HMD) and allows the user to interact with the system in many different ways, providing the user with realistic AR experience.