Herding Sheep: Live System Development for Distributed Augmented Reality

Abstract

In the past, architectures of Augmented Reality systemshave been widely different and taylored to specific tasks. Inthis paper, we use the example of the SHEEP game to showhow the structural flexibility of DWARF, our component-basedDistributed Wearable Augmented Reality Framework,facilitates a rapid prototyping and online developmentprocess for building, debugging and altering a complex,distributed, highly interactive AR system.The SHEEP system was designed to test and demonstratethe potential of tangible user interfaces which dynamicallyvisualize, manipulate and control complex operations ofmany inter-dependent processes. SHEEP allows the usersmore freedom of action and forms of interaction and collaboration,following the tool metaphor that bundles softwarewith hardware in units that are easily understandable to theuser. We describe how we developed SHEEP, showing thecombined evolution of framework and application, as wellas the progress from rapid prototype to final demonstrationsystem. The dynamic aspects of DWARF facilitated testingand allowed us to rapidly evaluate new technologies.SHEEP has been shown successfully at various occasions.We describe our experiences with these demos.