Predictive Context-Awareness for Full-Immersive Multiuser Virtual Reality with Redirected Walking

Abstract

The advancement of virtual reality (VR) technology is focused on improving its immersiveness, supporting multiuser virtual experiences (VEs), and enabling the users to move freely within their VEs while remaining confined to specialized VR setups through redirected walking (RDW). To meet their extreme data-rate and latency requirements, future VR systems will require supporting wireless networking infrastructures operating in mmWave frequencies that leverage highly directional communication in both transmission and reception through beamforming and beamsteering. We propose the use of predictive context-awareness to optimize transmitter and receiver-side beam-forming and beamsteering. By predicting the users' short-term lateral movements in multiuser VR setups with RDW, transmitter-side beamforming and beamsteering can be optimized through line-of-sight (LoS) “tracking” in the users' directions. At the same time, predictions of short-term orientational movements can be utilized for receiver-side beam-forming for coverage flexibility enhancements. We target two open problems in predicting these two context information instances: predicting lateral movements in multiuser VR settings with RDW, and generating synthetic head rotation datasets for training orientational movements predictors. Our experimental results indicate that long short-term memory (LSTM) networks feature promising accuracy in predicting lateral movements, and context-awareness stemming from VEs further enhances this accuracy. Additionally, we show that a TimeGAN-based approach for orientational data generation can create synthetic samples that closely match experimentally obtained ones.