Remote Assistance Using Shared AR & WebRTC: Video Demo

Andrew Makarov,
Head of Mobile Development

Augmented reality has become the next step in ever growing effectiveness of remote collaboration and assistance. Here’s a video demo that proves it, combining two tech innovations—AR and WebRTC—to enable peer-to-peer communication and interaction by means of placing digital marks within a shared augmented space.

The primary feature of this augmented reality product demo is peer-to-peer communication between two participants. It was implemented by means of WebRTC, providing a convenient real-time solution for any cases of urgency. The auxiliary feature is brought with augmented reality, thus it is covered by the continuously expanding range of smartphones that support AR technologies.

Now a few words about the technical side of things. Our demo is based on 3 main technologies. First of all, WebRTC establishes two-way connection in real time, which allows to avoid server overload. Such video calls can be implemented with TokBox-powered OpenTok technology, which was successfully used by our team in a number of projects. Second, we used ARKit 2.0 for iOS (or ARCore 1.2 for Android, which is what you see in the video) to implement the augmentation feature. Third, the iOS application was written in Swift, while Kotlin was used for the Android version. The only current technical limitation is that the augmented scene must be static—not a moving vehicle, for example.

In a nutshell, this way of online interaction is simple and effective for end users. Its possible application ranges across a diversity of use cases in virtually any business sphere, be it collaboration of office workers, healthcare, industrial sector, or provision of services, as shown in the video. A viable alternative is an AR-powered manual, which in some cases may eliminate the need for expert involvement, retaining the explanatory value and convenience for users. We believe all this will become one of the rising trends in AR development.

For more video demos, check our Augmented Reality Demo Collection. Feel free to contact us with any questions about Augmented reality services.