Posted: 29th August 2017

Augmented Reality (AR) devices continuously scan their environment in order to naturally overlay virtual objects onto user's view of the physical world. In contrast to Virtual Reality, where one's environment is fully replaced with a virtual one, one of AR's killer features is co-located collaboration, in which multiple AR headset users interact with the same combination of virtual and real objects to design buildings, plan military operations, or even train and execute NASA’s Mars Rover missions.

To make collaborative augmented reality (AR) between multiple users secure, Oxford’s researchers Prof Ivan Martinovic and Ivo Sluganovic are working with University of Zagreb’s Prof Ante Derek and Matej Serbec. In their latest paper ‘HoloPair: Securing Shared Augmented Reality Using Microsoft HoloLens’ recently accepted for publication at the 33rd Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC), they propose HoloPair, a new security protocol for pairing two Microsoft HoloLens devices. ACSAC is a leading conference in system security. This year 48 out of 244 submissions were accepted (acceptance rate: 19.7%).

The authors have made the full source code of their prototype public, which you can find it at: tinyurl.com/holopair .