Hybrid avatars: enabling co-presence in multiple realities

Virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) technologies are quickly making their way into people's everyday lives. Typically, these technologies are used separately to create either plain VR or AR applications rather than harnessing the possibilities of combining the two. In this position paper, we introduce a novel concept of hybrid avatar that enables avatar-based interactions between VR and AR users visiting the same place both in the real world and its virtual counterpart. We illustrate a generic architecture for implementing hybrid avatar interactions, present our prototype implementation and discuss the implementation related challenges. Main contribution of this paper is to provide new ideas for research on the areas of VR, AR, and hybrid reality.

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