Optical Wireless Communication for Virtual Reality Systems
Problem Statement and Motivation
Virtual and augmented reality (VR/AR) systems are emerging technologies requiring data rates of multiple Gbps. Existing high quality VR headsets require connections through HDMI cables to a computer rendering rich graphic contents to meet the extremely high data transfer rate requirement. Such a cable connection limits the VR user's mobility and interferes with the VR experience. Current wireless technologies such as WiFi cannot support the multi-Gbps graphics data transfer. So, in this paper, we propose to use visible light communication (VLC) for establishing high speed wireless links between a rendering computer and a VR headset. But, VLC transceivers are highly directional with narrow beams and require constant maintenance of line-of-sight (LOS) alignment between the transmitter and the receiver. Thus, we present a novel multi-detector hemispherical VR headset design to tackle the beam misalignment problem caused by the VR user's random head orientation. We provide detailed analysis on how the number of detectors on the headset can be minimized while maintaining the required beam alignment and providing high quality VR experience.
Publications
Chakareski, Jacob, Mahmudur Khan, Tanguy Ropitault, and Steve Blandino. "Millimeter Wave and Free-space-optics for Future Dual-connectivity 6DOF Mobile Multi-user VR Streaming." ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications and Applications, 19, no. 2 (2023): 1-25, February 2023.
Chakareski, Jacob, Mahmudur Khan, and Murat Yuksel. "Toward Enabling Next-Generation Societal Virtual Reality Applications for Virtual Human Teleportation: A novel future system concept and computation-communication-signal representation trade-offs." IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, 39, no. 5 (2022): 22-41, September 2022.
Chakareski, Jacob, and Mahmudur Khan. "Wifi-VLC dual connectivity streaming system for 6DOF multi-user virtual reality." Proceedings of the 31st ACM Workshop on Network and Operating Systems Support for Digital Audio and Video, Pages 106-113, Istanbul, Turkey, July 2021.
Chakareski, Jacob, Mahmudur Khan, Tanguy Ropitault, and Steve Blandino. "6DOF virtual reality dataset and performance evaluation of millimeter wave vs. free-space-optical indoor communications systems for lifelike mobile VR streaming." Proceedings of the 54th Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems, and Computers, Pages 1051-1058, IEEE, Pacific Grove, CA, USA, November, 2020.
Khan, Mahmudur, Jacob Chakareski, and Sabyasachi Gupta, "RF-FSO Dual-Path UAV Network for High Fidelity Multi-Viewpoint Scalable 360° Video Streaming", Proceedings of IEEE International Workshop on Multimedia Signal Processing (MMSP), Pages 1-6, Tampere, Finland, September, 2020.
Khan, Mahmudur, and Jacob Chakareski. "Visible Light Communication for Next Generation Untethered Virtual Reality Systems." Proceedings of IEEE ICC Workshop on Optical Wireless Communications, Shanghai, China, May 2019.