W3C Immersive Web Face-to-face meeting at Google HQ

Held March 18–19 at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, the W3C Immersive Web Working Group and Community Group meeting brought together representatives from Google, Microsoft, Apple, Meta, and Niantic. These groups are tasked with shaping high-performance XR experiences for the open web via browser-based APIs that interact with XR devices and sensors.

OARC was honored to open the meeting with a joint presentation by Mikel Salazar, HCI-3DUI Researcher at the IFE VR Department, and Ali C. Hantal, Co-President of Open AR Cloud and CEO of XR Masters.

• Mikel Salazar introduced key GeoPose concepts and proposed the addition of a WGS84-based WebXR reference space, aligning with the GeoPose Basic standard to bring accurate geopositioning into browser-based XR.
• Ali C. Hantal presented on OGC’s GeoPose and OGC’s Points of Interest (POI) standards, demonstrating how these are being applied to build an open spatial web platform for both native mobile and WebXR clients. His demo showcased interoperable spatial content and POIs anchored in the real world leveraging Augmented City’s VPS technology. The content was seamlessly visible across the MyGeoVerse mobile client app (developed by XR Masters) and the SpARcl WebXR client (developed by Open AR Cloud).

This live demonstration marked the first time in the world that multiple XR clients — built independently by different developers — interoperated through shared geospatial standards in a live, location-based setting. Team member Nazih Fino, CEO of Global Nomads, also provided technical and logistical support for the session.

Khronos Group “3D on the Web 2025”

The following evening, the GeoPose outreach team continued their momentum at the Khronos Group’s 3D on the Web 2025 event. This well-attended gathering brought together over 100 developers, engineers, and industry professionals advancing the future of 3D web graphics.

During this session, both Mikel and Ali took the stage again. Mikel highlighted the value of open geospatial standards like GeoPose for enhancing the capabilities and interoperability of Web-based technologies and Ali presented on how OGC standards like GeoPose and POI are enabling an interoperable and standards-based spatial web. The audience was introduced to the same cross-platform demo featured at W3C, highlighting the critical role open standards play in bridging AR experiences across browsers and native mobile applications.

Explore more about the Open Spatial Web demo and presentations:

Click here for Mikel Salazar’s Presentation and here for Ali C. Hantal’s presentation.

You may also click here to read OGC’ s post about these presentations, titled “OGC GeoPose Outreach to W3C and Khronos Group”

Advancing the Open Spatial Web: OARC at W3C and Khronos Group Events was originally published in openarcloud on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

With the start of 2025, the Open AR Cloud (OARC) and its European subsidiary, the Open AR Cloud Europe (OARC EU) team, are excited to look back to 2024 and look ahead to what 2025 will hold for us by providing an overview of the various advancements, activities, and contributions of our members and partners.

Funded Research Projects:

Open AR Cloud Europe gUG closed its second year of XR 4 Human a Horizon Europe funded 36 month project

The XR4Human Project kicked off working on our European Code of Conduct for XR

Now the team needs your insights & expertise of you the XR Community/ Industry, raise your voice and support the work towards a European Code of Conduct for XR Technologies

The Expertise and insights of you are needed on a report on the “Ethical, policy, regulatory and interoperability aspects of XR technology document”, which maps out issues and solutions identified in work packages related to the report and aligns them with relevant stakeholders in the XR4Human project and will lead to the Universal Code of Conduct we are currently working on.

Please fill out the survey below!
https://lnkd.in/exZYzWbg

The Experience Library (for non commercial work)

We’ve created an interactive curated library that hosts eXtended Reality (XR) experiences! The XR4Human Experience Library aims to empower the community to highlight their commitment to best practices by sharing their own XR experiences. Each submission is meticulously tagged, making it effortless to search and sort by key criteria such as technology type, required hardware, domain focus, and user experience level.

Contribute with your own XR non-commercial experience and submit your projects.

https://xr4human.eu/experience/

The Open-source, Scalable and Continuous Augmented Reality Services for Urban Spaces (OSCAR4US)

The Open-source, Scalable and Continuous Augmented Reality Services for Urban Spaces (OSCAR4US) an NGI Search funded 12 month project officially kicked off October 2024 coordinated by Open AR Cloud Europe including IFE, Nokia Bell Labs, OnSiteViewer, Immersal and Augmented City.

Within this project Open AR Cloud Europe aims to further develop the Open Spatial Computing Platform (OSCP) to serve as the basis for city-scale location-based augmented reality (AR) experiences. It is highly related to the AR Cloud, Spatial Web, and the EC CitiVerse visions, which similarly redefine the way we experience and engage with digital content/data in physical space. In particular, our project addresses the following points of the 5th NGI Search call: (1) Search and discovery features for existing digital common projects, (2) Revolutionizing Internet dynamics: AI-network synergies, digital twins, and metaverse innovations. These technologies are fundamental to the research goals and long term vision of Open AR Cloud.

Our representative use cases involving mobile pedestrians, vehicles, and numerous obstacles offer the opportunity to build and test tools for search and discovery services, virtual content authoring, and sharing in communities. We will also provide tutorials for developers on how to use the OSCP in third-party applications

Standards Work:

Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC)

Within the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) our organization continues to be a key contributor to the GeoPose Standard working group, with several contributing members and two of the co-chairs. After the standard was approved in 1.0 version in 2022 put some effort into promoting the adoption to our members and to the wider tech community. A key part of that is building demos, and visualizations that showcase the benefits for interoperability. We are also promoting the use of the standard within other standards that OGC is developing. An interesting development useful for any web service or application is that GeoPose is now registered officially as a GeoPose+JSON MediaType. The SWG is also working on a GeoPose version 1.1 Further we are hopeful that GeoPose will see more implementation and adoption base on the work we are doing within the Metaverse Standards Forums working group on Real-Virtual World integration.

Metaverse Standards Forum (MSF)

Open AR Cloud continues to participate in the MSF through co-chairing the Real/Virtual World Integration Working Group (along with co-chairs from OpenSitePlan and OGC, and Intel) and contributing to prototype development.

The MSF ride-hailing prototype (in conjunction with OGC Testbed 19) uses a simple highly relatable use-case to assess and evolve key open spatial building blocks. These building blocks align closely with components in the Open Spatial Computing Platform (OSCP) such as Spatial Discovery, Open Visual Positioning Service (Open VPS), and Reality Modeling. Additionally the MSF WG provides a new venue for engaging with key SDOs (ex. OGC, Khronos, W3C) on potential new standards (ex. real-world URIs, spatial discovery, and protocols for mapping, localization, and scene understanding).

We look forward to a growing partnership with MSF and opportunities for joint funded R&D initiatives such as test beds.

DIN Standards Body Membership

Open AR Cloud Europe gUG joined the German DIN Standards body and its NA 043–01–24 AA Metaverse and Extended Reality working group (still need to be confirmed within the next yearly meeting as full member)

Standards Implementations:

March 2024 Historical Open Interoperability Spatial Web Demo at OGC’s 128th Member Meeting in Delft, Netherlands

The presentation highlighted how two different clients — SpARcl, a WebXR-based mobile browser, and XR-Masters’ native app, MyGeoVerse — successfully connected to OSCP services.

Augmented City offered a GeoPose Protocol-compliant endpoint for visual positioning, while the MyGeoVerse backend provided OSCP Content Discovery Services for publishing and discovering 3D content and POIs at real-world locations.

This demonstration underscored the advantages of open standards and protocols compared to proprietary, closed systems.

Testbeds & AR Cloud Activations by Partners:

Februrary 2024
Halden, Norway, AR Wayfinding
Based on a small research-grant Open AR Cloud and several OARC partners including IFE, XR-Masters, OnSiteViewer and Augmented City worked together with a HiØ (local collage) and Halden municipality on testing the usefulness of AR wayfinding for people width a variation is sight and mobility. To do this we set up a partial instantiation of the Open Spatial Computing Platform including OSCP GeoPose Service compliant VPS and tested interactive auditory, text and visual digital information indoor and outdoor at the test location (Halden City Hall and the city square outside). The results of the testing were promising. Representatives of a local association for differently abled people in Norway were especially enthusiastic about the results and have expressed interest in doing further work with us on this to develop beyond research prototypes.

February 2024
Snowbreak 2024 (Uludag, Turkiye)

XR Masters sponsored Snow Break 2024, held at a ski resort in Uludağ, Turkey. The event, organized by the Boğaziçi University Sports Committee, featured persistent AR wayfinding content and a multi-user AR game for students to enjoy. The hotel lobby was AR Cloud-enabled using Augmented City’s VPS service and XR Masters’ MyGeoVerse platform.

October 2024
TTG Travel Experience Event, Rimini, Italy
At the TTG Travel Experience 2024 in Rimini, the Augmented.City team, in collaboration with the Associazione Startup Turismo, transformed the entire Next Startup pavilion with their proprietary immersive content.
For 3 days, international operators and key players from leading companies in the sector had the opportunity to view videos and various 3D proprietary graphics of the exhibitors in augmented reality. These graphics were placed using the AC VPS next to both the main stage and each stand.

October 2024
5G Techritory Event, Riga, Latvia
At 5G Techritory 2024 in Riga, XR Masters showcased the transformative power of XR technology. The ATTA CENTRE was AR Cloud-enabled using Augmented City’s VPS and XR Masters’ MyGeoVerse platform. The demonstration featured immersive capabilities such as AR navigation, interactive exhibits, and cutting-edge displays, in collaboration with the Kuldiga Tourism Centre. Additionally, students from Riga Technical University created 3D artwork, which was uploaded to the MyGeoVerse platform and displayed on the first floor of the conference, highlighting the creative potential of immersive technologies.

We were honored to have Latvia’s Minister for Smart Administration, Honorable Inga Berzina, experience the AR Cloud activations firsthand, using her mobile phone to explore the potential of immersive technologies.

October 2024
Festival of Regions in Italy, Bari, Italy

The Augmented.City team showcased the rich potential of artificial intelligence and immersive technologies during the Festival of Regions in Italy. Piazza Ferrarese in the heart of the historic center of Bari was transformed into a world full of fantastic scenes with birds, animals, and historical content. All of this was made possible by artificial intelligence and AR Cloud technologies to valorize the historical inheritance of any Italian city.

Michele Emiliano (the president of the Apulian region) personally experimented with Augmented.City applications and admired the results.

Presentation and Event Participation:

March 2024 OGC’s 128th Member Meeting in Delft, Netherlands

During the 128th OGC Member Meeting, the OARC team — Our co-presidents Jan-Erik Vinje, and Ali C. Hantal and Board Member of OARC Europe, Gabör Söros, — delivered an engaging talk on how the Open AR Cloud Association utilized OGC standards for GeoPose and POIs within the Open Spatial Computing Platform (OSCP), an initiative to prototype an Open Spatial Web Platform.

June 2024

Gábor Sörös, Sebastian Eger — Poster: Mobile Robots and Sensor Streams in an Open Spatial Computing Platform, In EuCNC 6G Summit, Antwerp, Belgium, 3–6 June 2024

August 2024 IEEE International Conference on Metaverse Computing, Networking, and Applications (MetaCom), Hong Kong, China

Gábor Sörös, James Jackson, Michael Vogt, Mikel Salazar, Alina Kadlubsky, Jan-Erik Vinje — An Open Spatial Computing Platform.
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10740111

October 2024, 5G Techritory Event, Riga, Latvia

Our Co-president, Ali C. Hantal, participated in a panel discussion alongside industry leaders from Nokia, NOVA ICT, and the University of Patras, focusing on the impact of XR and digital twins on tourism, education, and cultural preservation.

Another significant event that took place in Riga was the signing ceremony of the newly established European Metacities Partnership partnership. A total of 36 institutions from 12 countries signed this MOU, and OARC is excited to be one of them. We look forward to working together in the coming years.

December, 2024 Participating at various EU events including Stereopsia 2024

Here the project was represented with two workshops during the morning of the first day, and part of the EU village sharing a space with other EU funded projects.

“Integrating Ethics Into XR: A European Code of Conduct for Responsible Design” Led by Rose-Marie de la Cruz Bernard & Rigmor Barajas ( Co-Coordinators of XR4HUMAN)”

The second workshop the XR4HUMan project teamed up with OpenVerse another Horizon Europe funded project to dedicate a full workshop on interoperability: Co-Creating solutions with EU-SMEs
See all the project’s currently published reports on the EU Open Research Repository on Zenodo.

https://xr4human.eu/

Annual Wrap up of 2024 was originally published in openarcloud on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We belive the best future for spatial computing is one based on open standards and protocols like the open web platform rather than proprietary walled gardens and app stores. Watch this historical Open Spatial Web Interoperability Demo by Open AR Cloud partners Augmented City and
XR Masters at the 128th OGC Member meeting in Delft, Netherlands. Two Spatial Web clients (SpARcl and MyGeoVerse) connect to prototypical spatial web services using open standards from OGC (GeoPose and POIs), the Khronos Group (glTF), and W3C (WebXR) as well as the Open Spatial Computing Platform (OSCP) protocols for GeoPose VPS and Spatial Discovery.

For more information please visit:

https://www.openarcloud.org/oscp/poi

Historical Interoperability Demo for POI data on OSCP, at OGC’s 128th Member Meeting in Delft was originally published in openarcloud on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

During the 128th OGC Member Meeting, a team from OARC consisting of Gabör Söros, Ali C. Hantal and Jan-Erik Vinje gave a talk on how we are using OGC standards for GeoPose and POIs in the Open Spatial Computing Platform (OSCP), our attempt at prototyping something like an Open Spatial Web Platform. In the talk we explain how two different clients, one that runs in a mobile browser based on WebXR called SpARcl and one native app by XR Masters called MyGeoVerse both connect to OSCP services. Augmented City provides a OSCP GeoPose Protocol compliant endpoint for visual positioning and MyGeoVerse backend provides OSCP Content Discovery Services for publishing and discovering 3D content and POIs at real world locations. This is a demonstration of the the benefits of open standards and protocols over proprietary walled gardens.

OOARC Presentation at GeoPose SWG Session at 128th OGC Member Meeting at Delft was originally published in openarcloud on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Authors: Alina Kadlubsky, Jan-Erik Vinje, Ali Hantal, Suzan Oslin

As the year nears its end, the Open AR Cloud (OARC) team is exited to share an overview of the various advancements, contributions, and things to celebrate from 2022!

We start this overview with our first experience as key contributors to Funded research projects where we among other things got the opportunity to make improvements on open source components for the reference Open Spatial Computing Platform (OSCP) including the OSCP compliant “Aurora Viewer” browser based AR client. Another major milestone was the the publication of the GeoPose draft standard by the Open Geospatial Consortium(OGC), where our volunteers have made key contributions. We celebrate that our organisation took part in founding the Metaverse Standards Forum and that we have started new active OSCP Testbeds and a number of OSCP related projects. At the end we take a this look at some of the many ways our volunteers have been spreading our message during this year with a long section on Open AR Cloud in the News and on Stage

Funded research projects:

Project Aurora and Aurora Viewer.

Here we present the outcome of a three-month funded research project granted by NGI Atlantic to Open AR Cloud Europe

Team:
EU: Alina Kadlubsky, Dr. Gábor Sörös, Jonathan Tiedtke, John Nilsson,
Pär Nordenhjälm Linde, Karthik S. Kumar, Mikael Spuhl, Christine Perey,
US: Ivan Seskar, Jennifer Shane, Prof. Dr. Bo Han, Prof. Dr. Songqing Chen, Nan Wu

End-to-end open source location-based augmented reality in 5G.

During the three-month NGI Atlantic-funded research project, we worked on a fully open-source, end-to-end solution for placing, storing, and re-discovering geo-anchored AR content in the real world. We advanced the Open Spatial Computing Platform (OSCP) components and deployed it in a 5G testbed. Created a client in Unity and built representative demo applications that allow virtual objects to persist throughout space and time.

We also developed a data collector application for spatial mapping and connected the OSCP with an open-source visual positioning system.

(https://github.com/colmap/colmap) and Hierarchical Localization (HLOC) (https://github.com/cvg/Hierarchical-Localization).

The team has built the mapping and localization service’s back-end
service by leveraging Colmap.

Furthermore, we created tutorials on the setup to foster its adoption in the scientific community as a platform for location-based AR experiments.

For more info, visit https://www.auroraviewer.org/

Project kickoff for the XR4Human project funded by Horizon Europe

We are super proud that Open AR Cloud Europe and our close partner the Norwegian Institute for Energy Technology (IFE) won a EUR 2.5 million R&D grant under the Horizon Europe program togeather with 10 other consortium partners across Europe for the XR4Human proposal. Both IFE and Open AR Cloud Europe will be work package leaders on two important topics. IFE will lead a work package on empowering end-users with a rating system and an educational toolbox while OARC Europe will lead the work package on interoperability.

A few weeks ago in November the consortium had its initial kick-off meeting preparing the start of the R&D effort. Stay tuned for updates in the next months and years!

For those interested please check out our recent blogpost about the XR4Human project!

OGC GeoPose Draft spec published!

Major milestone for GeoPose to become a universal interoperable 3d connection between the real and the digital world.

On the 28th of November, the OGC GeoPose 1.0 Data Exchange Draft Standard was published by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), a founding member of OARC and one of our closest partners. This will enable interoperability between all systems, solutions, or experiences that need to encode and share the real-world geospatial pose (GeoPose) of any real or digital 3d object. In the case of AR Cloud technology, the most obvious benefit of GeoPose is that it enables better interoperability between different visual positioning services (VPS) and more seamless ways to publish and discover shared persistent AR experiences worldwide. In the same way, the URL and the hyperlink provided a universal way to connect the information hosted on web servers anywhere in the world, OARC believes the GeoPose encoding can provide a universal way to connect the real and the digital world together.

At this milestone, we can proudly reflect on how, even before we formed the Open AR Cloud Association, several of our founding members were already advocating for a universal standard for real-world position and orientation. In the spring of 2019, before the publishing of the State of the AR Cloud Report at our first symposium right before Augmented World Expo in Santa Clara, we proposed to OGC that we should create a standards working group to define a universal GeoPose standard. The initial response was positive, and in May of 2019, Scott Simmons, currently the Chief Standards Officer at OGC, co-authored a working group charter for GeoPose with OARC’s Jan-Erik Vinje and Christine Perey. Since 2020, OARC volunteers and other OGC members have worked together to specify the current version of the standard.

To make the draft standard into a proper standard, we are seeking implementers for all the current JSON encoding targets in the spec! The first few implementations are already in places, such as in the OARCs Open Spatial Computing Platform (available in multiple testbeds worldwide), VPS services, AR clients, and experiences created by OARC partners. It is likely to be included in the Real/Virtual World Integration Exploratory Group charter in the Metaverse Standards Forum. A growing number of large and small spatial computing companies and standards development organizations are currently looking into supporting GeoPose.

Many thanks to all who have contributed so far! We encourage everyone in the industry to support this standard to make the next era of computing more open and interoperable.

Open AR Cloud founding principal member of the Metaverse Standards Forum

Open AR Cloud is proud to be a founding principal member of the Metaverse Standards Forum (MSF). Our values are very closely aligned, and the MSF membership has surpassed an incredible 2000 organizations. Together with OpenSitePlan and the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), OARC established one of the first MSF exploratory groups chartered with real/virtual world integration. The exploratory group has over 300 members and is progressing toward creating a charter for an official working group in January. The charter will include some high-level near-term and long-term goals around key building blocks and use-cases for the real-world spatial web or real-world metaverse. These building blocks align closely with OSCP concepts such as service discovery, experience discovery, mapping and localization, and reality modeling. The group will prioritize action and software development and is very excited about the impact that will be created by the MSF community.

New OSCP testbeds started activites!

Besides our test beds in Bari, Italy, we established other test beds in Istanbul and Ankara, Turkey.
We further advance our solutions and services within research test beds linked to funded research projects. Many of our partners and members implement and test our technology within OSCP-compliant projects at various places worldwide.

Test bed Bari Italy

AR Industrial Assistant

Augmented City’s industrial app of AR assistant for the purification plant in Puglia (Bari metropolis) uses Augmented City’s VPS using OSCP Geopose protocol. The solution is up and running with the following functionality

• Navigation inside the territory of the plant
• Updating in real-time the maintenance in progress. Each machinery has an info sticker in AR with short info regarding the status;
• Integration with the ERP system of the plant ;

Users have constant access to accurate positioning for localization and the ability to update the data automatically when connected to the application to provide the maintenance of the industrial machinery.

Test bed Istanbul Turkey

New Years Gift Hunt in Taksim Square

Location-based AR game New Year’s Gift Hunt was launched in Istanbul and in Ankara in the last week of December and was available the first . Users downloading XR Masters spatial browser mobile app, enjoyed a multi-user, shared, and persistent AR experience and participated in the Gift Hunt by activating AR content to win prizes such as Istanbul-New York round trip flight tickets from Turkish Airlines and accommodations at The Marmara Hotel. VPS provider was Augmented City.

First High School Test Bed, Işık Highshools, Turkey

Culture, Art and Technology Days event organized by FMV Işık Schools

FMV Işık Schools became the first “Highschool Testbed Partner” of Open AR Cloud. Işık High School students attended training session provided by OARC to learn how to scan/map their environment to enable Augmented City’s VPS, then they uploaded their 3D artwork to XR Masters Content Management Platform and placed them onto real world to create an art hybrid exhibit during the “FMV Işık Schools Culture, Art and Technology Days”.

If you are interested in becoming a Test Bed Partner please send an e-mail to testbed@openarcloud.org

More noteable OSCP Compliant projects

MIT Reality Hack 2022

Several areas of the MIT campus were visually mapped. 3D AR artworks created by Novaby was placed inside MIT’s Straton Student Center through XR Masters app, which was powered by Augmented City’s VPS.

“Hacking” the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade

Story about Flying Bagels by Anne Kadet, from the Café Anne newsletter. (She was previously the NYC business and trends columnist for the Wall Street Journal.)

There's a Giant Flock of Bagels Flying Around My Living Room!

More info about Stephen Black’s GeoPose projects here: https://medium.com/p/7529b011ad4a

Open AR Cloud in the News and on Stage

Augmented World Expo USA Santa Clara 2022

Open AR Cloud: Towards an Open, Interoperable, and Ethical Real World Spatial Web

OARC Board Members presented potential guiding principles for OARC’s Open Spatial Computing Platform and the early steps to the realization of standards activities.

Speakers:

Ali C. Hantal, Board Member at OARC, Founder at XR Masters
James Jackson, Director of Technology at OARC
Jan-Erik Vinje , Managing Director at OARC, Founder at OnSiteViewer

Use Cases for the Realworld-Metaverse

OARC partners talked about the test beds and presented use cases such as way finding and NFT exhibits, as well as case studies that demonstrated how its technology was being used to build more diverse, equitable, and inclusive, real-world communities that raised awareness on important critical issues like climate change and public health.

Speakers:

Ali C. Hantal, Board Member at OARC, Founder at XR Masters
Julia Beabout, Creative Director at Novaby and OARC Partner
Suzan Oslin, Experience Director at UXXR and OARC Partner

AWE NITE Istanbul

Democratizing the Real World Metaverse

OARC Board Members and Leaders of Standards Developer Organizations discussed the importance of openness and standards for interoperability for a more democratic real-world metaverse.

Speakers:

Jan-Erik Vinje, Managing Director at OARC, Founder at OnSiteViewer
Ali C. Hantal, Board Member at OARC, Founder at XR Masters
Nadine Alameh, CEO at The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC)
Neil Trevett President at The Khronos Group
Ori Inbar CEO at AWE, Board Member at OARC

AWE Nite Istanbul

Augmented World Expo EU 2022

Real World Metaverse Roundtable

The world’s largest tech companies are spending billions to create metaverse platforms based on the real world. These visual maps, nerfed out digital cities and resulting mixed reality interactions will deliver real utility and magic to our daily lives. We’ll talk about who’s doing what, why and how; efforts to create open realities; identify killer apps, opportunities and obstacles ahead; plus share tips, tools & tricks to build better realities. Session continues in the bar afterwards to debate finer points of if we’re living in a simulation.

Speakers:
Ali Hantal, Founder at XR Masters, Board member of OARC
Avi Bar-Zeev, Chief at RealityPrime
Dave Lorenzini Director at Draw, Board member of OARC
Code Katherina Ufnarovskaia, CEO at Augmented City and Partner of OARC

Talking Metaverse Podcast at Gitex 2022, Dubai

OARC Board Member and XR Masters CEO Ali Hantal, was Immersal’s guest at Talking Metaverse Podcast by Tan Lay. Ali talked about OARC and the newly formed Metaverse Standards Forum and provided in-depth information about the importance of standards for interoperability for an open and democratic Metaverse. Click below to watch the full interview:
https://youtu.be/qFWeQX7_FkQ

Brandweek 2022 Istanbul

Talk about democratizing augmented realities in uncertain times.

OARC Board Members talked about “Democratizing Augmented Realities in Uncertain Times” during the Brandweek Istanbul event. “Brand Week Istanbul” is one of the biggest creativity and business festivals in the EMEA region.

Speakers:

Jan-Erik Vinje, Managing Director at OARC, Founder at OnSiteViewer
Ali C. Hantal, Board Member at OARC, Founder at XR Masters

Our Projects and Achievements in 2022 was originally published in openarcloud on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

XR4HUMAN — Equitable, Inclusive, and Human-Centered XR

XR4HUMAN is a recently funded EU project awarded EUR 2.5 million Euros within Horizon Europe, one of the world’s largest research and innovation programs.

Open AR Cloud Europe gUG is excited to announce its participation in XR4HUMAN, an inspiring and diverse consortium bridging the gap between academia and industry.

Under XR4HUMAN 12 organizations, including, University of South-Eastern Norway, Fontys University, Fraunhofer Heinrich-Hertz-Institute, Institute for Energy Technology (IFE), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Leiden University, National Technical University of Athens, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Open AR Cloud Europe (OARCEU), University of Leeds (UoL) UK, University of Oslo, XR4Europe (XR4Europe), will collaborate on the development of European standards to accelerate the adoption of human-centric development processes of privacy safety and ethics for XR hardware and software. The common goal is to develop a strong and competitive ecosystem around XR technology for trade and industry, with an emphasis on trust for users, municipalities, and authorities alike. XR4HUMAN aims to make it easier for citizens, businesses, and public institutions to make good choices in connection with XR technology adoption and use.

The work of the twelve partners in XR4HUMAN will be coordinated by the University of South-Eastern Norway (USN). One of the major efforts in the project, led by Alina Kadlubsy, Managing Director of Open AR Cloud Europe (OARC EU), is on interoperability and seamless integration of XR. In addition, OARC EU will contribute to other work packages within this project including ethics, privacy, safety, and security, Regulatory and Governance legal, as well as privacy, safety, and security frameworks. OARC EU will also participate in a USN-led initiative focused on developing a code of conduct for equitable, inclusive, and human-centered XR.

OARC EU is well-represented by members among the project’s partners and stakeholders. The project’s external advisory board includes two representatives from Open AR Cloud Association (OARC) founding member organizations, Christine Perey and Gabriel Rene, both with significant experience in leading standardization work. Additionally, another essential advisor is XRSI Europe.

Staff from the research institute IFE, a founding member of OARC, will participate in the OARC-led interoperability work package. Lucas Stephane, a Senior Scientist AR/VR at IFE, will lead a work package on empowering end-users with a rating system and an educational toolbox.

In addition, in our recently completed three months NGI transatlantic research project for OARC EU, we’ve developed key essential components that will be useful for the testing within the real life test bed in Kirchheim (close to Munich) within the Demonstration and validation work package. This project secures significant funding for the essential work done in Europe which will have a broader impact on the global XR community and industry, making sure we drive the development of open and interoperable spatial computing technology, data, and standards to connect the physical and digital worlds for the benefit of all.

About the research project:

This project has received funds from the EU’s research and innovation program Horizon Europe under Grant Agreement no 101070155.

Project title:

«The Equitable, Inclusive, and Human-Centered XR Project (XR4HUMAN)»

Partners:

• University of South-Eastern Norway (USN) (Coordinating Institution) NO
• Fontys University (FU) NL
• Fraunhofer Heinrich-Hertz-Institute (HHI) DE
• Institute for Energy Technology (IFE) NO
• Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) DE
• Leiden University (LU) NL
• National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) GR
• National University of Science and Technology (NTNU) NO
• Open AR Cloud Europe (OARC) DE
• University of Leeds (UoL) UK
• University of Oslo (UiO) NO
• XR4Europe (XR4Europe) BE

XR4HUMAN — Equitable, Inclusive, and Human-Centered XR was originally published in openarcloud on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The next, spatial web will reveal a dazzling world of visual information anchored to real places, seamlessly blended into the world around you. spARcl, a new sample browser-based application released by the Open AR Cloud organization is a simple yet powerful example of how standardized WebXR discovery and viewing of digital content for billions of users simply using the web browser they currently use, will reshape how we live, work, learn and play.

Spatial Web Developers, content creators, and emerging spatial computing platforms looking to publishing content to the widest possible audience can use this example to jumpstart open and interoperable discovery and viewing of location-based digital content. For more information, contact the Open AR Cloud team, and access the example application on github, here.

SpARcl is a part of a larger effort by the OpenARCloud.org group (aka: OARC) of industry partners and experts to define open and interoperable standards for spatial computing, that include standardized positioning of objects and experiences (GeoPose) /GeoPose Github, standardized indices of spatial content (Spatial Discovery Service), and formats to describe spatial data (RML — reality modeling language). Read on for more information, and join the OpenARCloud.org’s, to get involved.

Open Spatial Computing Platform Overview

Spatial computing is a broad term for a suite of technologies that result in users being immersed, engaged, and interacting with spatial and temporal digital information that pertains to the physical space in, around, and near the user. Simply put, spatial computing connects atoms with bits and allows users to directly interact with digital information. View an introductory video regarding this industry-wide consortium and ongoing efforts here (The Open AR Cloud )

Current Open Initiatives Include:

- GeoPose, an emerging standard under development in the Open Geospatial Consortium that when implemented will permit components and services to obtain, save/record, share and communicate geospatial position and orientation of any real or virtual objects with 6 degrees of freedom in a consistent fashion. GeoPose Draft Specification

- Spatial Discovery Service (SDS) A local listing of geo-located references in a “Spatial Discovery Service” will provide seamless access to content, services, applications communication channels that are available at a user’s location, conceptually similar to DNS, but operating in a more distributed way by focusing on referencing local resources.

- Reality Modeling Language A locally-shared Machine-Readable World that provides users and machines with a powerful new way to interact with reality through the standardized encoding of geometry, semantics, properties, and relationships (linked data) of a dynamic reality at their location through a Reality Service using a “Reality Modeling Language.”

Open Spatial Computing Testbeds

Through the OARC testbed program, we aim to showcase existing, OARC partner tools and platforms that are able to “realize” standards-based systems today. Our partners are capturing real-world environments in 3D and deploying reference implementations of the Open Spatial Computing Platform to demonstrate real value to real users, able to use mobile devices and smart glasses to discover & view visual information, localize devices & navigate spaces, and create, publish and share spatial info with others. Current testbeds include Bari, Italy, and Helsinki, Finland.

Partners, cities, companies, schools, and spatial developers are encouraged to contact us to transform their locations using Open Spatial Computing tools and standards.

On the OSCP testbeds, OARC is developing end-user applications and new services. With those in use, OARC is collecting feedback from users, developers, content creators, local businesses, governments of smart-city initiatives, and other stakeholders interested in open XR technologies, and real-world spatial computing.

In order to make our concept of the Open Spatial computing platform more approachable and understandable for individuals and organizations, we’ve started to conventionalize and develop our Web-Based Client Platform spARcl as one of the key puzzle pieces to showcase the possibilities of the Open Spatial Computing platform based on today’s advancement of the WebXR standard.

Instead of following a traditional browser/server/database stack spARcl’s concept is based on a web application with no server principal which means the spARcl app can work as a standalone app.

It is aiming to be small and fast while offering all the base functionalities that are needed to allow developers and creatives to build and present interesting and useful AR experiences.

• Real-time background synchronization is provided automatically and unobtrusively by Automerge.
• Instead of a server, an always-available headless peer living in a lambda function can be deployed, serving as a local data store and multi-user feature coordinator.

spARcl is still in its early stages, therefore a great playing field for any Creative or Developer with lots of potential for future experimentation.

Functionality

The Open AR Cloud team is aiming to have spARcl run as a long-running app, as easy to the device as possible with a simple localization which will be done occasionally in the background. Long-running means here, that sparcl isn’t developed for one specific AR experience, but can run any kind of experience registered with the discovery services of OSCP.

Visual elements are likely generated in app, with textual, image or graphics content. The user will see visual cues on screen for primary content, like important landmarks.

At some locations one might need more interactivity (multi-user more complex scenes) in this case accessing a signaling server for P2P and a headless client (making sure to have a clean and good performance) is necessary.

Interactive scenes can be created either with game engines like Unity and Godot, frameworks like three.js or babylonjs, or AR platforms including one of our recent partners Zappar in the future which will support us with the ongoing development of sparcl.

spARcl’s core concept follows a “local-first approach which is based on a set of principles for software that enables both collaboration and ownership for users including the ability to work offline (one of our future goals) and collaborate across multiple devices, while also improving the security, privacy, long-term preservation, and user control of data.”

Who benefits

Cross-industry services, the whole industry and community will benefit from its further development without any problems as an experimental platform, see and join UI / UX experimentation and experience the Web XR functionality in action.

spARcl is still in its early stages and constantly improved and worked on. The source code is available on Github your feedback and any contributions are very welcome and highly appreciated.

Please be part of the AR Cloud advancement, which has the power to become very influential in our digital future.

Experience & support the development of “spARcl! was originally published in openarcloud on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Following suit with other Events and Conferences, we are also moving our upcoming #3rdStateofthearcloud Symposium and Showcase into Cyberspace.
Open AR Cloud, a distributed team of experts and leaders in all the key disciplines of Spatial Computing is excited to share updates with the XR community. During the upcoming event, we will introduce a prototype of the Open Spatial Computing Platform based on open standards and protocols that are in development for designated city-scale testbeds. Our community of spatial computing professionals and partners are bringing a reference Open Spatial Computing platform into the real world to experiment, iterate, and validate its design and demonstrate it’s value to the world. Our goal is to foster an interoperable, scalable, and ethically sound alternative to closed and proprietary spatial computing platforms.

As our society accelerates towards a fusion of the physical and digital worlds, creating a safe and accessible human-centered ecosystem becomes very critical. We are bringing together interdisciplinary experts to share experiences and learn from each other during this virtual event day!

Secure your ticket today and have the opportunity to meet with the Open AR Cloud Team, our Partners and Members, and have a chance to win a pair of
Nreal Light AR Glasses Dev Kit, worth $ 1,200.

Have a little sneak peek on what to expect!

3rd State of the ARCloud Symposium and Showcase September 8th

(9 AM PST; 12 PM EST; 6 PM CET)

Organized in Collaboration with Cyber Summit Co

Tune in as the Scott Simmons, Chief Operating Officer of OGC & key OARC share the latest updates of their work towards a universal GeoPose Standard that will allow interoperable 3d placement of any digital content in the real world, as well as recording real-world position and orientation of physical objects for spatial computing.

XR Safety Initiative (XRSI) in Liaison with Open AR Cloud (OARC) and Academia

Spatial Computing and Extended Reality technologies provide a bridge that combines hardware, software, people, places, and information via HMD, digital contact lenses to haptic wearables, IoT devices, sensors, robots, autonomous vehicles, and beyond. In the same way that Web 2.0 took the world by storm, emerging technologies such as XR and Spatial computing will transform every aspect of our lives while this technological shift expands our capabilities and increases our potential, impacting every aspect of the economy, culture, and our lives, it also brings along deeper societal and privacy concerns.

XRSI in liaison with OARC and many experts from Cyber Security, Privacy, Spatial Computing, and the whole XR Domain have joined forces to address privacy in XR and Spatial Computing. The group will present the very first XR Privacy Compliance framework and what’s next on the shared roadmap.

Prototyping an “Open Spatial Web” in city-scale testbeds:

Back in October 2019 during our #2ndStateofthearcloud Symposium and Showcase, we announced our plans for designing and developing a reference Open Spatial Computing Platform (OSCP). Thanks to the diligent efforts of our Working Group members the initial building blocks are ready for real-world testing.

With the help of our partners, Augmented City and Immersal, we are launching the world’s first city-scale testbeds for a prototypical Open Spatial Web based on the OSCP concept. The initial testbeds are planned for one year of continuous operations. These city-scale testbeds will implement two of the most fundamental components of an Open Spatial Computing Platform: A GeoPose compliant positioning service, and a Spatial Discovery Service.

The testbeds will provide an opportunity to collect feedback from users, developers, content creators, local businesses, local smart-city initiatives, and other stakeholders that will yield valuable insights and inform future development.

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3rd State of the AR Cloud Symposium & Showcase was originally published in openarcloud on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Open AR Cloud (OARC) unveils plan for building blocks for an open and decentralized “Spatial Web” at its 2nd State of The AR Cloud Symposium

The Open AR Cloud (OARC) association, the world’s largest community of augmented reality and spatial computing experts, announced at their second “State of the AR Cloud Symposium”, an ambitious plan to design and build an open platform for the next era of computing.

Thirty years after the idea for the World Wide Web was initially proposed by Tim Berners-Lee, and one year after Open AR Cloud launched at AWE EU in Munich, Managing Director, Jan-Erik Vinje, outlined plans to build the core pieces of what they have named the Open Spatial Computing Platform (OSCP). Before the end of 2020 OARC intends to build implementations of the core pieces of an open and interoperable spatial computing platform for the real world. This, he says, is the best way to achieve the vision of what many refer to as the “Mirror World” or the “Spatial Web”.

He said it is essential that this ecosystem is designed for all of humanity in all its diversity and does not become a walled garden controlled by one or a few large corporations. Many of the world’s largest companies are currently investing heavily in this type of technology, but they might not be the best custodians of important things like the rights to privacy and freedom of individuals.

“Interestingly, the type of distributed architecture that is ideal for a ‘Spatial Web’ could unleash opportunity and prosperity around the world because spatial data, content and services are most valuable at its origin. If done right, OARC believes the Spatial Web will empower individuals, local businesses and communities alike to be in charge of their digital lives and economies!” said Jan-Erik.

The proposed system architecture has been developed by members of OARC working groups over the last few months and is based on the open AR Cloud framework laid out in the first State of The AR Cloud Report released on the 28th of May.

As part of this effort, OARC presented a plan to the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) to develop a universal standard for geospatial position and orientation (Geopose) to represent 6 degrees of freedom of real or virtual objects in a shared geospatial frame of reference. Members of OGC have until October 31st to vote on whether to start a Geopose Standards Working group by the end of this year.

“Everyone interested in AR Cloud technology should follow the outcome of that decision with keen interest. OARC believes geopose is a fundamental building block for an open and interoperable Spatial Web,” Jan-Erik Vinje, the Managing Director of Open AR Cloud, said.

“Geopose is as essential to real-world spatial computing as the URL is to the web. The same way URLs are a standardized way for information to link to other information, geopose will provide a universal way to connect the digital world to the physical world and vice versa,” he explained.

During the 1st State of the AR cloud Symposium and Showcase, May 2019 in Santa Clara, XRSI announced its partnership with us. At the same time, XRSI also announced its Media and Awareness effort, Ready Hacker One. In less than six months, together with their liaison organizations, XRSI has made great strides in identifying industry trends and risks related to XR domain. At today’s symposium, XRSI founder Kavya Pearlman, together with their Media and EU Strategy Adviser, Marco Magnano, provided an overview of XRSI accomplishments and upcoming projects, as well as the announcement of their breakthrough partnership with the National Cyber Security Alliance (NCSA) with the crucial objective of updating and including XR risks within their Stop.Think.Connect. global awareness campaign. XRSI also released the very first baseline standard curating definitions and XR industry key terms, available for comments and feedback until 1st Jan, 2020 here: https://www.xrsi.org/xr-dcf-request-for-comments.

Today, the OARC announces a partnership with VERSES Labs and the Spatial Web Foundation. The parties intend to work together to develop a pilot of the Hyperspace Transaction Protocol (HSTP) within the Open Spatial Computing Platform as a way to demonstrate an AR Cloud implementation within the Spatial Web that supports geopose and that leverages VERSES TIPS Framework (Trust, Interoperability, Privacy, Security) in alignment with the OARC Privacy Manifesto.

“The OARC’s commitment to supporting standards around privacy and interoperability is central to the Spatial Web Foundation’s mission of building a Spatial Web that respects and protects its users and development communities. We are excited to partner with OARC in this pioneering work in order to demonstrate to the world the essential features needed to secure the future of the web,” said Gabriel Rene, Executive Director of the Spatial Web Foundation.

Get more info at https://openarcloud.org and www.thespatialweb.org

For more information and to get involved, please contact:

Jan-Erik Vinje | Tlf.+47 48 03 70 51 | E-mail: jan-erik.vinje@norkart.no

Open AR Cloud (OARC) unveils plan for building blocks for an open and decentralized “Spatial Web”… was originally published in openarcloud on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.