Download PDFSupporting Augmented Reality: Looking Beyond Performance
by Lemuel Soh, Jeff Burke and Lixia Zhang
in ACM VR/AR Network’18, August 2018
Recent years have witnessed a surge in augmented reality (AR) applications in various markets and verticals, together with emerging toolkits and platforms to support new developments. However, the vision of a pervasive augmented reality held by many still seems a distance away. Notwithstanding the many ongoing efforts to tackle AR performance challenges, we argue that much attention is needed to other research areas including network architecture, security, privacy, and the development of business cases. Similar to the Web, existing AR applications are built upon TCP/IP protocol stack and rely on cloud computation. To enable pervasive AR applications, we believe that new computing paradigms, new approaches to network communications, and new business models need to be explored. Edge computing paradigms, which utilize performance advantage of server class hardware within physical vicinity, could achieve the required low latency while protecting user privacy. We further argue that Named Data Networking (NDN), a proposed new internet architecture, can be an enabler for pervasive AR by supporting local resource discovery, offering built-in communication security, and enabling experimentation with new business models. We hope that this position paper spurs greater thinking beyond performance improvements to push AR forward.