From James Planey 2/6/2025
ILLIXR: An End-to-End Systems Research Approach to Enable the Era of Immersive Computing
Immersive computing (including virtual, augmented, mixed, and extended reality) has the potential to transform most industries and human activities. Delivering on this potential, however, requires bridging an orders of magnitude gap between the power, performance, and quality-of-experience attributes of current and desirable immersive systems. With a number of conflicting requirements - 100s of milliwatts of power, milliseconds of latency, unbounded compute to realize realistic sensory experiences – no silver bullet is available. Further, the true goodness metric of such systems must measure the subjective human experience within the immersive application. The ILLIXR research group is engaged in an integrative research agenda developing codesigned end-to-end systems from hardware to system software stacks to AI models spanning the end-user device/edge/cloud, with metrics that reflect the immersive human experience, in the context of real immersive applications. Central to our work is ILLIXR (Illinois Extended Reality testbed), an open-source end-to-end XR system and research testbed, to democratize immersive systems research. In this talk, members of the ILLIXR group will describe the ILLIXR testbed and our research providing orders of magnitude higher efficiency and new functionality for XR systems.