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Mixed reality web service platform

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Abstract

This paper presents a RESTful Web service platform for applications for both Web browsers and mobile clients. Having a common service backend makes creating applications fast, simple, and open to third parties. The paper presents two mixed reality applications that have been built on the platform. It summarizes requirements for a mixed reality platform and defines a mixed reality domain model that the platform and applications share. In addition, it describes how the clients can use the REST interface to perform operations on user-generated content, as well as access real-life commercial geo-content such as street-view panoramas and building models.

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Notes

  1. http://layar.com/.

  2. http://www.wikitude.org/.

  3. http://flickr.com.

  4. http://oauth.net.

  5. A building footprint is the outline of the total area of a lot or site that is surrounded by the exterior walls of a building or portion of a building.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the Mixed Reality Solutions program at Nokia Research Center, and in particular people that were involved in the design and implementation of the City Scene and Image Space clients on top of our MRSWS APIs.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Tampere Laboratory, Nokia Research Center, P.O. Box 1000, 33721, Tampere, Finland

    Petri Selonen, Petros Belimpasakis, Yu You, Timo Pylvänäinen & Severi Uusitalo

Authors
  1. Petri Selonen
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  2. Petros Belimpasakis
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  3. Yu You
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  4. Timo Pylvänäinen
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  5. Severi Uusitalo
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Petros Belimpasakis.

Additional information

Communicated by Thomas Plagemann.

Appendices

Appendix 1: Example of retrieving geo-content

An example of retrieving a building representation is as follows:

The building has a binary 3D model that can be retrieved by requesting the resource described in the 3d_model attribute. The 3D representations are provided in the PLY file format [1]. The elevation of the building’s base relative to sea level is described in base_elev in meters. The roof_elev describes the elevation of the roof, again relative to sea level. The 2D geometry of the building a multipolygon describing the building footprint, is presented as point s of ( lon, lat ) pairs.

Appendix 2: Example of collections of MR resources

The contents of a particular container can be retrieved as follows:

Appendix 3: Example of updating an MR resource

An existing resource can be updated using PUT with the new updated representation. For example, if we assume an existing photo resource:

Appendix 4: MRSWS API overview

A summary of the current MRSWS API is given in Table 2. By adhering to the RESTful architecture style and uniform interface, the core of the API specification can be captured by a resource model.

Table 2 MRSWS API overview
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Selonen, P., Belimpasakis, P., You, Y. et al. Mixed reality web service platform. Multimedia Systems 18, 215–230 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00530-011-0254-9

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