MUCVR: Edge Computing-Enabled High-Quality Multi-User Collaboration for Interactive MVR

Mobile Virtual Reality (MVR), which aims to provide high-quality VR services to mobile devices of end users, has become the latest trend in virtual reality developments. The current MVR solution is to remotely render frame data from a cloud server, while the potential of edge computing in MVR is underexploited. In this paper, we propose a new approach named MUCVR to achieve high-quality interactive MVR collaboration for multiple users by exploiting edge computing. Firstly, we design “vertical” edge–cloud collaboration for VR task rendering, in which foreground interaction is offloaded to an edge server for rendering, while the background environment is rendered by the cloud server. Correspondingly, the VR device of a user is only responsible for decoding and displaying. Secondly, we propose the “horizontal” multi-user collaboration based on edge–edge cooperation, which synchronizes the data among edge servers. Finally, we implement the proposed MUCVR on an MVR device and the Unity VR application engine. The results show that MUCVR can effectively reduce the MVR service latency, improve the rendering performance, reduce the computing load on the VR device, and, ultimately, improve users' quality of experience.