KEITAI-Space: photo-based shared virtual space on cellular phones

Virtual space, which models the real world, brings lots of benefits when it covers a considerably wide area and can be used in a mobile computing environment. However, there are some difficulties in implementing virtual space on the mobile computing environment, mainly due to hardware limitations such as computation power, communication capability, and memory size. In this paper, we ease the difficulties of using large-scale virtual space based on the real world (LVBR) in the mobile environment. We have established a scalable and efficient method of constructing and managing LVBR on cellular phones, and have implemented a system named KEITAI-Space. KEITAI-Space is designed to provide the scalable photo-based virtual space to cellular phones that takes into account the hardware limitations. The virtual space is made of a collection of photos and can be edited and expanded by people with cellular phones on hand.