RealityGit: Cross Reality Version Control of R&D Optical Workbench

Multi-user collaboration at research and development (R&D) workbenches in advanced optics laboratories involves updating and documenting the status of hundreds of components. Although there are abundant mixed reality (MR) systems to support the collaboration of spatially co-located users, limited methods are available to facilitate cooperation in the spatial-temporal domain. Inspired by the version control workflow used in software development, we propose RealityGit, a novel cross-reality (CR) system design that leverages the recent advancements of neural radiance fields (NeRF). We illustrate how the NeRF model can be used to channel users with different extended reality (XR) experiences by providing an accurate immersive visual documentation of the historical states of a complex R&D workbench. We demonstrate the feasibility of such a system through an implementation where users could contribute to the version control workflows by integrating historical NeRF scans into their MR devices or providing status reviews by annotating or editing a NeRF model in virtual reality (VR).