A First Look at Immersive Telepresence on Apple Vision Pro

TL;DR

This paper empirically evaluates immersive telepresence experiences on Apple Vision Pro, revealing that FaceTime uniquely offers true immersion with optimized bandwidth and rendering, but faces scalability challenges.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed empirical analysis of immersive telepresence applications on Apple Vision Pro, highlighting performance differences and optimization strategies.

Findings

FaceTime offers true immersive experience with spatial personas.

FaceTime uses semantic data and visibility-aware optimizations.

Scalability of FaceTime is limited due to server-allocation issues.

Abstract

Due to the widespread adoption of "work-from-home" policies, videoconferencing applications (e.g., Zoom) have become indispensable for remote communication. However, they often lack immersiveness, leading to the so-called "Zoom fatigue" and degrading communication efficiency. The recent debut of Apple Vision Pro, a mobile headset that supports "spatial persona", aims to offer an immersive telepresence experience. In this paper, we conduct a first-of-its-kind in-depth and empirical study to analyze the performance of immersive telepresence with Apple FaceTime, Cisco Webex, Microsoft Teams, and Zoom on Vision Pro. We find that only FaceTime provides a truly immersive experience with spatial personas, whereas others still operate 2D personas. Our measurement results reveal that (1) FaceTime delivers semantic data to optimize bandwidth consumption, which is even lower than that of 2D persona for other applications, and (2) it employs visibility-aware optimizations to reduce rendering overhead. However, the scalability of FaceTime remains limited, with a simple server-allocation strategy that potentially leads to high network delay for users.