Augmenting augmented reality with pairwise interactions: The case of Count Luigi Ferdinando Marsili shooting game

Thanks to an ever increasing processing power that can today support advanced graphical capabilities within high bandwidth mobile devices, augmented reality technologies are now ubiquitous, finding profitable uses in a wide variety of scenarios. Augmented reality principles, in fact, can be beneficially put to good use within many types of mobile applications: for example, augmented city guides can properly display additional virtual objects that show how a monument was at the time of its construction (e.g., the Colosseum with the inclusion of its missing parts), or augmented games can add fictitious characters and objects to real world settings in proper places (e.g., Lara Croft in search of Bartoli in Venice). Nonetheless, the totality of such augmented mobile applications, to the best of our knowledge, limit the interactions that may occur to those that can happen between a single mobile user and the objects that are displayed on his/her mobile platform screen. In this work, we show that it is possible to devise a new interaction paradigm, augmenting augmented reality apps with the interactions that may occur between multiple users via the virtual objects displayed on multiple mobile platforms. In particular, we applied such ideas to the devise of a shooting game set in the 17^th century to celebrate the 300^th anniversary since the foundation of the Academy of Science of Bologna by Count Luigi Ferdinando Marsili. The paper describes and discusses the design choices and the technical issues at the basis of our system.