Exploiting Position History for Efficient Remote Rendering in Networked Virtual Reality

Distributed virtual reality systems require accurate, efficient remote rendering of animated entities in the virtual environment. Position, velocity, and acceleration information about each player is maintained at the player's local machine, but remote hosts must display this information in real-time to support interaction between users across the network. Prior applications have transmitted position information at the local frame rate, or they have relied on dead-reckoning protocols using higher derivative information to extrapolate entity position between less frequent updates. These approaches require considerable network bandwidth and at times exhibit poor behavior. This paper describes a position history-based protocol whose update packets contain only position information. Remote hosts extrapolate from several position updates to track the location and orientation of entities between infrequent updates. Our evaluation suggests that the position history-based protocol provides a network-scalable solution for generating smooth, accurate rendering of remote entities.