Toward Enabling Next-Generation Societal Virtual Reality Applications for Virtual Human Teleportation: A novel future system concept and computation-communication-signal representation trade-offs

Virtual reality (VR) is an emerging technology of great societal potential. Some of its most exciting and promising use cases include remote scene content and untethered lifelike navigation. This article first highlights the relevance of such future societal applications and the challenges ahead toward enabling them. It then provides a broad and contextual high-level perspective of several emerging technologies and unconventional techniques and argues that only by their synergistic integration can the fundamental performance bottlenecks of hyperintensive computation, ultrahigh data rate, and ultralow latency be overcome to enable untethered and lifelike VR-based remote scene immersion. A novel future system concept is introduced that embodies this holistic integration, unified with a rigorous analysis, to capture the fundamental synergies and interplay among communications, computation, and scalable signal representation that arises in this context, and advance its performance. Several representative results highlighting these tradeoffs and the benefits of the envisioned system are presented at the end.