VesARlius: An augmented reality system for large-group co-located anatomy learning

Interactive educational environments are one of the prime applications for the use of Augmented Reality (AR). A large variety of such systems has been proposed in the past for various areas of education. However, in most cases the number of users these AR systems can support is limited. Only few systems have been developed that support a large number of co-located users to jointly collaborate in a dynamic and interactive learning environment. Multi-user AR collaboration presents a unique setting with distinct challenges and requirements for user interaction and information sharing. In this paper, we present VesARlius, a novel AR system for collaborative and interactive anatomy learning in a large group of co-located users. Our system employs a set of multi-user collaboration paradigms allowing users to engage in an interactive AR learning environment. We evaluated the collaborative features of our system in a user study with 16 medical students. Results demonstrate the potential of the VesARlius system to be used effectively for large-group AR anatomy learning. From our lessons learned, we provide a set of design guidelines for developing similar AR systems to enable large-group collaboration in other application domains.