Plants and zombies: Two use cases for on-location panorama viewing in handheld mobile AR

Panoramas, as a medium, have traditionally provided viewers with an encompassing experience of distant locations. In recent years, this experience has been augmented by combining handheld orientation sensors with digital panoramas to create mixed reality experiences that transform mobile devices into windows to the remote. Less explored, have been the mixed reality opportunities afforded through the viewing of mobile panoramas non-remotely, at or near their real world epicenters. This paper presents two handheld AR web applications, running on publicly available hardware and software, that utilize panoramas to facilitate both remote and on-location AR experiences. It explores how the experience and the utility of a panorama differ depending on the location in which it is viewed.