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Many have predicted the future of the Web to be the integration of Web content with the real-world through technologies such as Augmented Reality (AR). This has led to the rise of Extended Reality (XR) Web Browsers used to shorten the long AR application development and deployment cycle of native applications especially across different platforms. As XR Browsers mature, we face new challenges related to collaborative and multi-user applications that span users, devices, and machines. These collaborative XR applications require: (1) networking support for scaling to many users, (2) mechanisms for content access control and application isolation, and (3) the ability to host application logic near clients or data sources to reduce application latency. In this paper, we present the design and evaluation of the AR Edge Networking Architecture (ARENA) which is a platform that simplifies building and hosting collaborative XR applications on WebXR capable browsers. ARENA provides a number of critical components including: a hierarchical geospatial directory service that connects users to nearby servers and content, a token-based authentication system for controlling user access to content, and an application/service runtime supervisor that can dispatch programs across any network connected device. All of the content within ARENA exists as endpoints in a PubSub scene graph model that is synchronized across all users. We evaluate ARENA in terms of client performance as well as benchmark end-to-end response-time as load on the system scales. We show the ability to horizontally scale the system to Internet-scale with scenes containing hundreds of users and latencies on the order of tens of milliseconds. Finally, we highlight projects built using ARENA and showcase how our approach dramatically simplifies collaborative multi-user XR development compared to monolithic approaches.
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This content will become publicly available on June 22, 2026
Extended User Feedback– A Questionnaire for Usability Evaluation in XR
When developing an application for production, end-user questionnaires are a rapid way of acquiring user evaluations about the product’s usability. These questionnaires include topics such as the base of the application, user interface, and various ailments related to the application, to say the least. Multiple types of questionnaires and methods have been developed to assist developers with feedback acquisition. However, with such a wide-range of disciplines, there is not a standard used by all developers in the research community. Furthermore, as applications are delivered using various devices, such as mobile, desktop, and now XR, new questionnaires have arisen. Compiling these evaluations leads to a large number of questions (100+), a multitude of redundancies, and difficulty comparing related applications due to lack of a solidified system. Furthermore, XR development requires unique feedback that typical presentations of data and engagement do not contain. In this work, we create a concise subset of questions, on a 5-point likert scale, that remove redundancies and allows for comprehensive statistical analysis, allowing developers to measure differences in populations more readily.
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- PAR ID:
- 10641410
- Publisher / Repository:
- Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction
- Date Published:
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- Gothenburg, Sweden
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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