Mixed and Augmented Reality (MAR) has been getting popular as various applications were introduced since smartphones broke into wider consumer market. While current MAR applications on smartphones focus on information browsing services, mostly providing text and 2D image based information to the users. By nature MAR applications provide three-dimensional interface and will gain more focus on providing 3D graphics content as the technology gets mature. Current efforts focus on utilizing and extending capabilities to support augmented reality (AR) and mixed reality (MR) applications.

Consortium formed a special interest group on MAR initiatives in July 2009. Several Web3D Consortium member projects has been showcasing the feasibility of AR in X3D, particularly X3DOM open source produced by Fraunhofer IGD. Meanwhile, Web3D Korea Chapter members also proposed couple of proposals for extending X3D standard to support MAR visualization. Based on these efforts, Web3D consortium moved forward to forming the MAR Working Group in order to explore wide variety of possibilities to extend X3D capabilities to support 3D enriched MAR applications.

Initial goals of MAR WG include:

• Collect requirements and describe typical use cases for using X3D in MAR applications
• Produce and propose X3D components for MAR scenes and applications
• Produce sample MAR applications using X3D to demonstrate how this functionality can work correctly

This Special Interest group membership is open to all members of the Web3D Community. We welcome members of the Consortium and anyone interested in Augmented Reality Standards. You can email the chairs for further information.