© The Eurographics Association 1999. Published by Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. 1 GRAPHICS ‘99 / P. Brunet and R.Scopigno Volume 18 (1999), number 3 (Guest Editors) Concept and Implementation of a Collaborative Workspace for Augmented Reality Anton Fuhrmann and Dieter Schmalstieg Institute of Computer Graphics, Vienna University of Technology Vienna, Karlsplatz 13/186/2, A-1040, Austria {fuhrmann|schmalstieg}@cg.tuwien.ac.at Abstract In this paper we present Studierstube Workspace, an application framework which supports multiple users, multiple applications and multiple 3D and 2D interaction contexts in an augmented environment. We develop a design concept for collaborative working environments in virtual reality, especially the concept of multi-user aware applications and show how our implementation fits into this concept. Implementation details and appli- cation samples conclude the paper. Keywords: computer graphics, virtual reality, augmented reality, user interface, Workspace, multi-user aware applications 1. Introduction Technical progress in recent years gives reason to believe that virtual reality (VR) has a good potential as the user in- terface of the future. At the moment, VR applications are usually tailored to the needs of a very specific domain, such as a theme park ride or a virtual mock-up for design inspec- tion. We believe that augmented reality (AR), the less ob- trusive cousin of VR, has a better chance to become a viable user interface for everyday applications, where a large vari- ety of tasks has to be covered by a single system. Studierstube 22 is a a collaborative augmented reality system allowing multiple users to gather in a room and ex- perience the sensation of a shared virtual space that can be populated with three-dimensional data Figure 1. Head- tracked see-through head-mounted displays (HMDs) allow each user to choose an individual viewpoint while retaining full stereoscopic graphics. A two-handed pen-and-pad in- terface, the personal interaction panel (PIP), is used to con- trol the application 28 . Studierstube is intended to be a collaborative AR user in- terface in which a variety of tasks can be performed. Such a user-interface is opposed to a dedicated application that is designed for only a single purpose (e. g., a driving simulator 19 ). The envisioned interface must satisfy three es- sential requirements: Figure 1: Collaborative work in STUDIERSTUBE Work- space:3D painting application window (focussed, middle) object viewer window(unfocussed, lower right)