Research Paper on VR: The Immersive Tech Revolution

Introduction

The development of Virtual Reality has been witnessed in the past two years. Through Virtual Reality, users develop the immersive senses of the virtual world in addition to the improvement of the user experiences in interactive scenarios such as gaming and automobiles. The devices of Virtual Reality are novel and attractive consumer electronics that allow users to achieve an immersive VR experience. There have been advances in virtual reality that allow the Web to be more interactive. For the visualization of VR content, internet browsers are utilized by WebVR and Mozilla's A-Frame from diverse devices such as mobile phones, desktops, and traditional VR headsets. Besides the visual sense, auditory sense has been employed to achieve the immersive user experience. However, despite the attempts on VR research to ensure the provision of high-quality and immersive multi-user experience is faced with challenges. Among the causal factors for this scenario include the limited computation and life power on mobile devices and the heterogeneous network conditions. The current project focuses on the A-Frame-based application design for multiple users and how variable network conditions affect the A-Frame application experience. The project aims at proposing the solution for playback synchronization for simultaneous remote users.

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The development of virtual reality has been supported by massive research to understand a virtual reality environment. According to Zhao, Zhang, Yan, Wang, and Fei (2017), an effective virtual reality environment facilitates immersive and high-quality multiuser experience. Improvements have been realized in the view of the virtual reality content through panoramic video technology though it mainly focuses on the visual aspect. Zhao, Zhang, Yan, Wang, and Fei (2017) recognize the attempt to improve the immersive experience of the multi-users in a virtual reality environment through the auditory sense that supplements the visual sense. The VR environment does not give users the best experience if audio is absent, even in the presence of effective visuals. Even in the presence of audio, if not properly made, users may experience some distractions as they watch the VR video from the browsers. Amidst the attempts to achieve the best experience among multiple users, researchers have identified various applications that allow the visualization of VR content using internet browsers.

Research has identified A-Frame based application, which makes use of browsers to visualize virtual reality content as the most effective in providing multiple users with common experience. Developing A-Frame does not require installation of anything; rather, it can be based on top of a plain HTML to make it easy to start. According to Liu, Vlachou, Qian, and Kim (2019), A-Frame offers a web framework that facilitates the building of virtual reality experience for all users. Besides providing a 3D view of the visual content because of it being a 3D scene graph, the authors observe that it serves as a powerful entity-component framework that leads to a composable, extensible, and declarative structure to three.js.

The interest to understand the virtual reality communities has attracted the development of A-Frame based applications. Simiscuka and Muntean (2018) revealed that though the creators of A-Frame maintain a-Frame based applications within Super-medium, originally, it was conceived within Mozilla. The authors observe that its development has facilitated an easy yet powerful way to develop VR content. They indicate that the A-Frame application can support multiple virtual reality headsets, including Windows Mixed Reality, Cardboard, Rift, Vive, Daydream, and Oculus Go. The fact that the application supports a whole spectrum of headsets it facilitates the usage by multiple users. Research has revealed that it has been critical in ensuring that there are fully immersive interactive VR experiences that are felt by users beyond the basic 360 visual content. The scenario makes full use of positional, tracking and controllers.

The emergence of online communication, the rise of social networks, and the change in the enterprise environments have facilitated different multi-user experiences on the Internet. Kijima and Yamaguchi (2016) agree that virtual reality has become important when used in these areas, in addition to applications in training, education, and collaborative meetings. The authors indicate that the successful use of virtual reality is because of the A-Frame based application, which has various enabling features that make it easier to visualize the virtual reality contents. According to Simiscuka and Muntean (2018), many of the enterprises would want to embrace virtual reality since it helps to reduce the costs in various areas and enhance the productivity from work done. The authors observe that the desire for these enterprises to virtual reality would not exist if users' experiences are different. Thus, many would prefer to use the A-Frame based applications to achieve common experiences.

Researchers such as Simiscuka and Muntean (2018) associate the achievement of common multi-users' experience to the virtual reality headsets such as Oculus Go and VIVE BE. This hardware works in collaboration with the VR software platforms for projects or meetings. From the ideas presented by the researchers, the virtual reality headsets identified, such as Oculus Go, are supported by A-Frame applications. Adding their voice to this presentation about the important role A-Frame applications play in the visualization of virtual reality, Ahn, Kim, and Kim (2018) associated this with the special features designed to support many users.

The design of the A-Frame base application supports various features that facilitate the use of virtual reality to by multiple users to give common experiences. Some of these features, as identified by Ahn, Kim, and Kim (2018), include the VR Made Simple feature, which suggests that there is nothing to install to start. It only requires dropping in a <script> tag and <a-scene> and allows the A-Frame to handle the VR setup, 3D boilerplate, and default controls. Another essential feature of the A-Frame application that allows multiple users is the Declarative HTML that is easy to read and understand. The entity-component architecture is an A-Frame application feature that makes a powerful three.js framework that provides reusable and a composable entity-component structure and ensures expanded access to WebVR and WebGUI. The cross-Platform VR allows the building of virtual reality A-Frame based applications for Oculus Rift and Vive that support all the users even when in multiple numbers.

Prior studies on the virtual reality, however, reveal some of the shortcomings of the design A-Frame based applications in supporting multiple users and their experience. For instance, Liu, X., Vlachou, Qian, and Kim (2019) argued that tethered head-mounted VR gears are neither safe nor support user mobility. The problems even worse in the case of the multi-user virtual reality scenario. Research into the use of A-Frame based application to visualize virtual reality content reveals some of the challenges that affect the experience of the multiple users. Among the identified challenges include limited battery life and computation power on mobile devices. Though, these challenges have been majorly considered for single-user VR rather than multiple users. For the case of the multiple users' virtual reality, the issue of variable network conditions has emerged when using A-Frame based applications.

The experience of A-Frame based application in the scenario of multiple users is affected by the variability in the network conditions. Like many other applications that use browsers to visualize virtual reality, A-Frame application does things that are strange whenever networks become slow or go out of range. In their study on the network performance in the virtual reality environment that involves multiple users, Li and Gao (2018) found that in the situation where the network condition is low or poor, the process of visualization slows down. The network is out of range, A-Frame application stops to run, which negatively affects many users, and this contributes to their bad experience with the browser which they are using. In the multiple user scenario for the A-Frame application, the effects of variable network conditions are not the same considering the user geographies. Often users who are within the range of the network, but it is poor or slow, tend to experience the slow visualization process for virtual reality content. Users wait for a relatively long time to have their content appear on the screen of the computer or mobile phones used.

Research into the challenges brought about by variable network conditions in virtual reality using the A-Frame application has identified the solution to the issue. The identified solution is regarding the playback synchronization for simultaneous remote users. The playback synchronization involves precise time management, which, according to Kijima and Yamaguchi (2016) is an essential technology used in virtual reality that ensures that there is proper prediction between the sensor and the display. The process requires that the user's head motion is predicted at the displaying moment for the image. It, therefore, includes the calculation of the prediction period from the measurement timing and the display.

However, Shattuck (2018) argued that the proposed solution varies depending on the field of virtual reality. For instance, the author suggests that in the postproduction of the film and the management of the file system on the networked computers, time-stamping is used to align the times of how the events occurred. Though, this time stamping has been explicitly introduced by only a couple of virtual reality systems. However, it comes to work in the case of the A-Frame based applications to solve the issue of variable network conditions. The strategy of time synchronization is essential when used in audio and video to improve the multi-users' experience that may be affected by the mismatch.

Conclusion

In conclusion, therefore, it is true that the A-Frame-based application is well-designed to allow multiple users to use browsers to visualize the content of virtual reality. However, sometimes there is a variation in the network conditions that affect the experience of multiple users of the A-Frame application. Besides the variability in the network conditions, other challenges, such as the security of the network, may affect the users. In connection to the change in network conditions, the solution has been proposed for playback synchronization for simultaneous remote users. In the case of time synchronization, the mismatch between the sensor and the display as well as the audio and the video is avoided.

References

Ahn, J., Kim, Y. Y. & Kim, R. Y. (2018). Virtual reality-wireless local area network: Wireless connection-oriented virtual reality architecture for next-generation virtual reality devices. Applied Sciences, 8(1), 43. Retrieved from: https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/8/1/43/htm

Shattuck, D. W. (2018). Multiuser virtual reality environment for visualising neuroimaging data. Healthcare technology letters, 5(5), 183-188. Retrieved from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6222246/pdf/HTL.2018.5077.pdf

Kijima, R., & Yamaguchi, K. (2016, March). VR device time-Hi-precision time management by synchronizing times between devices and host PC through USB. In 2016 IEEE Virtual Reality (VR) (pp. 201-202). IEEE.

Zhao, J., Zhang, B., Yan, Z., Wang, J., & Fei, Z. (2017, October). A study on the factors affecting audio-video subjective experience in virtual reality environ...