The recent renaissance in both virtual reality (VR, and in particular, WebVR) and mixed reality (MR) has highlighted a common missing element — the lack of protocol support for shared VR and MR environments.
While single-user environments have their uses, the last twenty years of the Web have conclusively demonstrated connectivity and collaboration provide overwhelming benefits. To have global reach, VR and MR must be built atop an open foundation of protocols supporting connectivity. Without that support, development and deployment of shared VR and MR environments will be slow and piecemeal, under-serving the potential of these new media.
The Mixed Reality Service (MRS) provides one necessary service: the capacity to map URIs to arbitrary geospatial or 3D coordinates.
The Mixed Reality Service (MRS) provides registration and discovery services binding the real world of geospatial coordinates to the virtual world of Universal Resource Identifiers (URIs). The MRS protocol consists of three commands: ‘add’ and ‘delete’, which allow additions and deletions to a mapping of geographical coordinates to URIs; plus ‘search’, which performs searches by geospatial coordinates, returning a list of matching mapped URIs. Potential uses of MRS include mixed reality applications, guidance for autonomous vehicles and drones, and vastly simplified delivery of nearly all location-based services. Simple modifications to MRS make it suitable for shared virtual worlds
