Q-VR: System-Level Design for Future Mobile Collaborative Virtual Reality

TL;DR

Q-VR is a novel software-hardware co-designed system that significantly improves the performance and latency of mobile VR experiences across diverse hardware and network conditions.

Contribution

It introduces a dynamic collaborative rendering approach leveraging human visual system insights and hardware capabilities for mobile VR.

Findings

Achieves 3.4x average speedup over traditional local rendering

Realizes 6.7x maximum speedup in performance

Improves frame rate by 4.1x compared to static collaborative rendering

Abstract

High Quality Mobile Virtual Reality (VR) is what the incoming graphics technology era demands: users around the world, regardless of their hardware and network conditions, can all enjoy the immersive virtual experience. However, the state-of-the-art software-based mobile VR designs cannot fully satisfy the realtime performance requirements due to the highly interactive nature of user's actions and complex environmental constraints during VR execution. Inspired by the unique human visual system effects and the strong correlation between VR motion features and realtime hardware-level information, we propose Q-VR, a novel dynamic collaborative rendering solution via software-hardware co-design for enabling future low-latency high-quality mobile VR. At software-level, Q-VR provides flexible high-level tuning interface to reduce network latency while maintaining user perception. At hardware-level, Q-VR accommodates a wide spectrum of hardware and network conditions across users by effectively leveraging the computing capability of the increasingly powerful VR hardware. Extensive evaluation on real-world games demonstrates that Q-VR can achieve an average end-to-end performance speedup of 3.4x (up to 6.7x) over the traditional local rendering design in commercial VR devices, and a 4.1x frame rate improvement over the state-of-the-art static collaborative rendering.