A picocell-based architecture for a real-time mobile virtual reality

A real time mobile virtual (VR) reality allows users to have much better capabilities to move and access virtual reality services than in conventional distributed VR environments, which are mainly based on desktop computers and VR equipment wired to them. The wireless communication of the system is based on in-building picocellular mobile personal surrounding networks, which enables the usage of simple hand held and battery operated mobile terminals, but still provides enough communication bandwidth for multimedia and VR applications. We present an architecture for this kind of virtual reality system, being developed in the University of Oulu (Finland) and VTT electronics. The architecture supports real time cooperation of two or more concurrent users and freedom to easily move inside a building from one cell to another. A protocol architecture, which will be used in the current implementation project of the system is based on mobile IP and streaming protocols, so any user in Internet can join the system. In addition to system and protocol architectures, we discuss the real time requirements of position tracking and accurate intra cell synchronization methods and suggest, how these requirements can be achieved using inexpensive off the shelf components