Edge-assisted Real-time Dynamic 3D Point Cloud Rendering for Multi-party Mobile Virtual Reality

Multi-party Mobile Virtual Reality (MMVR) enables multiple mobile users to share virtual scenes for immersive multimedia experience in scenarios such as gaming, social interaction, and industrial mission collaboration. Dynamic 3D Point Cloud (DPCL) is an emerging representation form of MMVR that can be consumed as a free-viewpoint video with 6 degrees of freedom. Given that it is challenging to render DPCL at a satisfying frame rate with limited on-device resources, offloading rendering tasks to edge servers is recognized as a practical solution. However, repeated loading of DPCL scenes with a substantial amount of metadata introduces a significant redundancy overhead that cannot be overlooked when enabling multiple edge servers to support the rendering requirements of user groups. In this paper, we design PoClVR, an edge-assisted DPCL rendering system for MMVR applications, which breaks down the rendering process of the complete dynamic scene into multiple rendering tasks of dynamic objects. PoClVR significantly reduces the repetitive loading overhead of DPCL scenes on edge servers and periodically adjusts the rendering task allocation during the application running to accommodate rendering requirements. We deploy PoClVR based on a real-world implementation and the experimental evaluation results show that PoClVR can reduce GPU utilization by up to 15.1% and increase rendering frame rate by up to 34.6% compared to other baselines while ensuring that the image quality viewed by the user is virtually unchanged.