CloudVR: Cloud Accelerated Interactive Mobile Virtual Reality

High quality immersive Virtual Reality experience currently requires a PC setup with cable connected head mounted display, which is expensive and restricts user mobility. This paper presents CloudVR which is a system for cloud accelerated interactive mobile VR. It is designed to provide short rotation and interaction latencies through panoramic rendering and dynamic object placement. CloudVR also includes rendering optimizations to reduce server-side computational load and bandwidth requirements between the server and client. Performance measurements with a CloudVR prototype suggest that the optimizations make it possible to double the server's framerate and halve the amount of bandwidth required and that small objects can be quickly moved at run time to client device for rendering to provide shorter interaction latency. A small-scale user study indicates that CloudVR users do not notice small network latencies (20ms) and even much longer ones (100-200ms) become non-trivial to detect when they do not affect the interaction with objects. Finally, we present a design of CloudVR extension to multi-user scenarios.