Matchmaking game players on public transport

Ministry of Education, Singapore under its Academic Research Funding Tier

FlashBack: Immersive Virtual Reality on Weak Mobile Devices via Rendering Memoization

Virtual Reality Head-mounted Displays (HMDs) are attracting users with the promise of full sensory immersion in virtual environments. Creating the illusion of immersion for a near-eye display results in very heavy rendering workloads: low latency, high framerate, and high visual quality are all needed. Tethered VR setups in which the HMD is bound to a powerful gaming desktop limit mobility and exploration, and are difficult to deploy widely. Products such as Google Cardboard and Samsung Gear VR purport to offer any user a mobile VR experience, but their GPUs are power-constrained and therefore fail to produce acceptable frame rate and latency for even scenes of modest visual quality. We present FlashBack, an unorthodox design point for HMD VR that eschews all real-time scene rendering. Instead, FlashBack aggressively precomputes and caches all possible images that a VR user might encounter. FlashBack memoizes costly rendering effort in an offline step to build a cache full of panoramic images. During runtime, FlashBack constructs and maintains a hierarchical storage cache index to quickly lookup images that the user should be seeing. On a cache miss, FlashBack uses fast approximations of the correct image while concurrently fetching better cache entries for future requests. Moreover, FlashBack not only works for static scenes, but also for dynamic scenes with moving and animated objects. We evaluate a prototype implementation of FlashBack and report up to an 8x improvement in framerate, 97x reduction in energy consumption per frame, and 15x latency reduction compared to a locally-rendered mobile VR setup. In some cases, FlashBack even delivers better framerates and responsiveness than a tethered HMD configuration on graphically complex scenes