You Only Render Once: Enhancing Energy and Computation Efficiency of Mobile Virtual Reality

Mobile Virtual Reality (VR) is essential for achieving convenient and immersive human-computer interaction and realizing emerging applications such as Metaverse and spatial computing. However, existing VR technologies require two separate renderings of binocular images, thereby causing a significant bottleneck for mobile devices with limited computing and battery capacity. This paper proposes a new approach to optimizing mobile VR rendering called YORO. By utilizing the per-pixel attribute, YORO can generate binocular VR images from the monocular image through genuinely one rendering, saving half the computation over conventional approaches. Our experimental evaluation and detailed user study indicate that, YORO can save 27% power consumption on average and increase frame rate by 115.2%, while maintaining similar binocular image quality compared with state-of-the-art mobile VR rendering solutions. YORO is production-ready and has already been tested in real VR applications. The source code, demo video, prototype android app, video game engine plugins, and more are released anonymously at YORO-VR.github.io.