Geollery: A Mixed Reality Social Media Platform

PubDate: May 2019

Teams: University of Maryland

Writers: Ruofei Du；David Li；Amitabh Varshney

PDF: Geollery: A Mixed Reality Social Media Platform

Abstract

We present Geollery, an interactive mixed reality social media platform for creating, sharing, and exploring geotagged information. Geollery introduces a real-time pipeline to progressively render an interactive mirrored world with three-dimensional (3D) buildings, internal user-generated content, and external geotagged social media. This mirrored world allows users to see, chat, and collaborate with remote participants with the same spatial context in an immersive virtual environment. We describe the system architecture of Geollery, its key interactive capabilities, and our design decisions. Finally, we conduct a user study with 20 participants to qualitatively compare Geollery with another social media system, Social Street View. Based on the participants’ responses, we discuss the benefits and drawbacks of each system and derive key insights for designing an interactive mirrored world with geotagged social media. User feedback from our study reveals several use cases for Geollery including travel planning, virtual meetings, and family gathering.