You Only Render Once: Enhancing Energy and Computation Efficiency of Mobile Virtual Reality

TL;DR

EffVR is a novel rendering optimization technique for mobile VR that reduces computation and energy consumption by generating binocular images from a monocular image with a single rendering, significantly improving efficiency and frame rate.

Contribution

EffVR introduces a per-pixel attribute-based method to generate binocular VR images from a monocular image, halving the rendering workload for mobile VR devices.

Findings

27% average power savings

115.2% increase in frame rate

High image quality with SSIM 0.9679 and PSNR 34.09

Abstract

Mobile Virtual Reality (VR) is essential to achieving convenient and immersive human-computer interaction and realizing emerging applications such as Metaverse. However, existing VR technologies require two separate renderings of binocular images, causing a significant bottleneck for mobile devices with limited computing capability and power supply. This paper proposes an approach to rendering optimization for mobile VR called EffVR. By utilizing the per-pixel attribute, EffVR can generate binocular VR images from the monocular image through genuinely one rendering, saving half the computation over conventional approaches. Our evaluation indicates that, compared with the state-of-art, EffVRcan save 27% power consumption on average while achieving high binocular image quality (0.9679 SSIM and 34.09 PSNR) in mobile VR applications. Additionally, EffVR can increase the frame rate by 115.2%. These results corroborate EffVRsuperior computation/energy-saving performance, paving the road to a sustainable mobile VR. The source code, demo video, android app, and more are released anonymously at https://yoro-vr.github.io/