Research of Place-based 3D Augmented Community-Taking The 3D Virtual Campus as an Example

Place-based virtual community is the trend of recent researches on pervasive computing. The purpose is to enable users in a physical place to receive ubiquitous services from the environment while they communicate with each other unwittingly. The paper further promotes this idea by allowing remote users to join such a virtual community as well as to interact with members on site and calls this type of community as the place-based 3D augmented (PDA) community. With the help of the augmented reality technique, on-the-spot member can visually sense the remote users by their representing avatars. To achieve this goal, the ambient communication environment is required to support message flow among the remote users and people on site. Besides, this environment should be able to discover context passing among members of this community to provide proper services. The context issues and context-awareness approaches of PDA community are fully discussed in the paper. Finally, the infrastructure of this PDA community is also presented along with preliminary result of the prototyping environment.