  Current robot interfaces such as teach pendants and 2D screen displays used
for task visualization and interaction often seem unintuitive and limited in
terms of information flow. This compromises task efficiency as interacting with
the interface can distract the user from the task at hand. Augmented Reality
(AR) technology offers the capability to create visually rich displays and
intuitive interaction elements in situ. In recent years, AR has shown promising
potential to enable effective human-robot interaction. We introduce ARviz - a
versatile, extendable AR visualization platform built for robot applications
developed with the widely used Robot Operating System (ROS) framework. ARviz
aims to provide both a universal visualization platform with the capability of
displaying any ROS message data type in AR, as well as a multimodal user
interface for interacting with robots over ROS. ARviz is built as a platform
incorporating a collection of plugins that provide visualization and/or
interaction components. Users can also extend the platform by implementing new
plugins to suit their needs. We present three use cases as well as two
potential use cases to showcase the capabilities and benefits of the ARviz
platform for human-robot interaction applications. The open access source code
for our ARviz platform is available at: https://github.com/hri-group/arviz.
