Towards Real-Time Augmented Reality With Edge Servers and 5G Communications

摘要

Augmented and virtual reality are among the hottest new applications in multimedia services, with projected growth for the next few years resembling exponential levels. Indeed, the vision of a world where the virtual and real are nearly indistinguishable, and fully available on demand, to take you anywhere, let you do anything, is tantalizing. But that exponential growth depends critically to achieving technical goals not met by any existing technologies: ultra-low latency, ultra-high resolution and full coverage, and rock-solid reliability. In this paper, we consider the first and perhaps most critical aspect of this challenge: ultra-low latency. The real world has zero latency; for a virtual world to seem real, it must have imperceptible latency. Commercial systems are currently aiming for latencies on the order of 20-30ms. But some planned enterprise deployment (including one defense application: realistic battle simulation) would like latencies below 5ms. We point to a possible approach to this challenge using edge servers and 5G communications and make some observations of what may be achievable with methods outlined herein in the near future.