Qualitative Communications for Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality

Cédric Westphal, Dongbiao He, Kiran Makhijani, Richard Li

Abstract: Qualitative Communication has been proposed to increase the responsiveness of a network due to packet loss. The basic idea is to allow the network to drop part of the payload to preserve the integrity of the session (as opposed to dropping whole packets as in TCP).We consider this idea in the context of AR/VR and see how selectively dropping payload naturally fits with such an application where the data can be easily split within some critical and non-critical data. We present basic mechanism to leverage qualitative communications in 360 degree video streaming, as well as a pre-fetching scheme. We evaluate this proposal on actual 360 video traces and show the significant improvement of our proposal versus a vanilla transmission mechanism.