Purdue Researchers Develop Multiplayer VR Approach for Smartphones

Purdue University researchers created an approach for multiple players to interact with the same virtual reality game on smartphones using a Wi-Fi connection. It also provides a “better and more cost-effective option for single-player use,” said professor Charlie Hu, who led the Purdue team. Coterie manages the challenge of rendering high-resolution virtual scenes to meet the stringent quality-of-experience (QoE) of VR. Those include high frame rate and low motion-to-photon latency, the delay between the movement of the user's head or game controller and the change of the VR device's display reflecting the user's movement, they said. The approach enables 4K-resolution VR on commodity mobile devices and allows up to 10 players to interact in the same VR application at a time, they said. VR apps using Coterie divided the heavy rendering task between the smartphone and an edge server over Wi-Fi in a way that reduces the load on the smartphone while allowing sub-frames rendered on both to be merged into the final frame within 16 milliseconds, satisfying the VR QoE, they said. Multiple players can share the same Wi-Fi with Coterie, which reduces the power draw and computation demand on each mobile device and provides a better user experience, researchers said. They also positioned the Coterie system for enterprise, education, health and entertainment applications.