{"id":238355,"date":"2016-06-01T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2016-06-01T07:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/msr-research-item\/flashback-immersive-virtual-reality-on-mobile-devices-via-rendering-memoization\/"},"modified":"2018-10-16T20:07:19","modified_gmt":"2018-10-17T03:07:19","slug":"flashback-immersive-virtual-reality-on-mobile-devices-via-rendering-memoization","status":"publish","type":"msr-research-item","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/publication\/flashback-immersive-virtual-reality-on-mobile-devices-via-rendering-memoization\/","title":{"rendered":"FlashBack: Immersive Virtual Reality on Mobile Devices via Rendering Memoization"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Virtual reality head-mounted displays (VR 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 too power-constrained to produce an acceptable framerate and latency, even for scenes of modest visual quality.<\/p>\n

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 more closely-matching entries from its cache for future requests. Moreover, FlashBack not only works for static scenes, but also for dynamic scenes with moving and animated objects.<\/p>\n

We evaluate a prototype implementation of FlashBack and report up to a 8\u00d7 improvement in framerate, 97x reduction in energy consumption per frame, and 15\u00d7 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<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Virtual reality head-mounted displays (VR 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"msr-url-field":"","msr-podcast-episode":"","msrModifiedDate":"","msrModifiedDateEnabled":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"footnotes":""},"msr-content-type":[3],"msr-research-highlight":[],"research-area":[13547],"msr-publication-type":[193716],"msr-product-type":[],"msr-focus-area":[],"msr-platform":[],"msr-download-source":[],"msr-locale":[268875],"msr-field-of-study":[],"msr-conference":[],"msr-journal":[],"msr-impact-theme":[],"msr-pillar":[],"class_list":["post-238355","msr-research-item","type-msr-research-item","status-publish","hentry","msr-research-area-systems-and-networking","msr-locale-en_us"],"msr_publishername":"ACM - Association for Computing Machinery","msr_edition":"MobiSys 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