Cutting the Cord: Designing a High-quality Untethered VR System with Low Latency Remote Rendering

This paper introduces an end-to-end untethered VR system design
and open platform that can meet virtual reality latency and quality
requirements at 4K resolution over a wireless link. High-quality
VR systems generate graphics data at a data rate much higher than
those supported by existing wireless-communication products such
as Wi-Fi and 60GHz wireless communication. The necessary image
encoding, makes it challenging to maintain the stringent VR latency
requirements. To achieve the required latency, our system employs a
Parallel Rendering and Streaming mechanism to reduce the add-on
streaming latency, by pipelining the rendering, encoding, transmission
and decoding procedures. Furthermore, we introduce a Remote
VSync Driven Rendering technique to minimize display latency. To
evaluate the system, we implement an end-to-end remote rendering
platform on commodity hardware over a 60Ghz wireless network.
Results show that the system can support current 2160×1200 VR
resolution at 90Hz with less than 16ms end-to-end latency, and
4K resolution with 20ms latency, while keeping a visually lossless
image quality to the user.