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Social virtual reality (VR) has the potential to gradually replace traditional online social media, thanks to recent advances in consumer-grade VR devices and VR technology itself. As the vital foundation for building the Metaverse, social VR has been extensively examined by the computer graphics and HCI communities. However, there has been little systematic study dissecting the network performance of social VR, other than hype in the industry. To fill this critical gap, we conduct an in-depth measurement study of five popular social VR platforms: AltspaceVR, Horizon Worlds, Mozilla Hubs, Rec Room, and VRChat. Our experimental results reveal that all these platforms are still in their early stage and face fundamental technical challenges to realize the grand vision of Metaverse. For example, their throughput, end-to-end latency, and on-device computation resource utilization increase almost linearly with the number of users, leading to potential scalability issues. We identify the platform servers' direct forwarding of avatar data for embodying users without further processing as the main reason for the poor scalability and discuss potential solutions to address this problem. Moreover, while the visual quality of the current avatar embodiment is low and fails to provide a truly immersive experience, improving the avatar embodiment will consume more network bandwidth and further increase computation overhead and latency, making the scalability issues even more pressing.
Cheng et al. (Fri,) studied this question.