An Open Spatial Computing Platform

Spatial computing has emerged as a potential new stage for personal and collaborative computing, however, existing systems are limited to small scale and/or are locked into proprietary silos. We present a fully open, scalable and distributed spatial computing platform, which could even bridge existing solutions. Drawing inspiration from the World Wide Web, we propose extensible protocols for discovering spatial services and spatial contents in a geographic area, representing poses of real and virtual cameras and objects, exchanging content records, and interfacing with various spatial computing services such as localization. We present the design choices and a reference implementation of the platform components together with a reference client based on WebXR. We demonstrate the usage of the platform in multiple testbeds and application scenarios. We develop the whole platform as open source to foster further research on large-scale spatial computing.