One of our contributions has been helping to lead an effort to share best practice around running experiments remotely as well as fostering a community of potential collaborators to run each others’ experiments to get some initial feedback on work. There is a Slack community that is sharing experience, and some of us wrote up some of the discussion in an article for Interactions Magazine

We also contributed to a panel discussion in the Frontiers in VR seminar series “XR for bringing people together in times of lockdown and post-COVID”

Finally Anthony was a contributor to the ACM’s Virtual Conferences, A Guide to Best Practices A community resource from the ACM Presidential Task Force on What Conferences Can Do to Replace Face-to-Face Meetings

CASMS is an EPSRC funded collaboration between University College London and University of Liverpool to investigate the requirements of the next generation of telecommunication networks supporting distributed and collaborative virtual reality.

Challenges of Distributed VR

Interactive environments work best when they provide fast and accurate feedback, allowing users to feel as if they are interacting like they would in the real world.

Distributing interactive environments over large distances is challenging because the delays between computers undermine the objective of making the whole system as responsive as possible.

CASMS’ objectives include to better understand what individuals need to interact remotely, and how synchronisation algorithms interact with the latency and bandwidth of a network to enable, or frustrate, this collaboration.

Network and Testbed

The CASMS testbed includes the provision of a high-speed fiber between UCL and UoL enabling L3 connectivity with high throughput and deterministic latency unavailable on the public internet.

The testbed is intended to be accessible to third-party users, allowing them to experiment with their technologies and applications in collaboration with CASMS. Anyone who is interested or would like to learn more is encouraged to get in touch!

New Technologies

The next generation of collaborative virtual worlds will be ever more immersive, not just through improved visual and auditory performance, but through enabling interaction through all five senses.

The CASMS project will experiment with and integrate new technologies, including haptic and olfactory interfaces. In this space CASMS will develop and improve hardware and algorithms for manipulating virtual worlds.

Key is understanding how a collaborative system operates as a whole, and where opportunities lie for improvements with future technologies such as 5G, being explored by partner projects from the same call.

Physically believable worlds need users to experience the same virtual space, but also time. The role of Edge Computing and options for Time Synchronisation are active topics in CASMS, allowing networks to be built of high and low power devices.

Outcomes

CASMS aims to add to the body of knowledge around building distributed AR and VR. The topics addressed relate closely to video games, teleconferencing, collaborative design, teleoperation and robotics.

Our applied research is disseminated through conferences, papers, code and collaborations.

A primary objective of CASMS is to define the requirements for future networks necessary to bring the state-of-the-art worlds in the lab to the future home, office and smartphone.