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Virtual and Augmented Reality in Broadband Assured IP Services (BAS) White Paper

From ARO bbf2017.377.03
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Revision Date: May 2017


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Comments or questions about this Broadband Forum Marketing Draft should be directed to help@broadband-forum.org.

Table of Contents
1 Executive Summary
2 Virtual Reality
3 Augmented Reality (AR)
4 Impact on the Network
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List of Figures
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List of Tables
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Executive Summary

Virtual Reality is not a new technology, it has been around for over 20 years in varying degrees of immersion. Some of us will remember the View Master along with early Nintendo products that brought immersion to game playing.

Figure 1
In 2016 virtual reality hit the market strong with new entry level cardboard mobile virtual reality products along with high end compute intensive virtual reality solutions (such as Oculus Rift and HTC Vive) that provide incredibly immersive and believable experiences.
The next-generation broadband networks must meet bandwidth demands of diversified applications and services . As part of the 20/20 vision, broadband assured services must support latency sensitive services that have specific requirements for bandwidth. These services include HD videos, virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) and autonomous driving, among others. A number of vertical industries, such as automotive, healthcare, energy, and municipal systems, are reliant upon high quality broadband services. Broadband networks today, however, have a difficult time providing extremely high bandwidth applications the ability to be forwarded along paths which would allow them the highest opportunity for low latency and high bandwidth. And broadband networks today focus primarily on providing connectivity to resources and services and focus less on providing dynamic delivery of the desired content. Allowing these high bandwidth applications to have a dedicated and dynamic slice, or path, of the network, would better allow for high Quality of Experience (QoE) and be an important advancement in supporting diversified broadband services.
AR/VR is a particularly latency sensitive, and extremely high bandwidth consuming set of applications, being used across all segments of the internet. Sending over 2 Gbps of highly latency sensitive live content to the cloud may not result in a successful virtual experience. Low QoE, including motion sickness, would likely result. By supporting the compute, storage and AR/VR content on the broadband network, the network will help enable, rather than inhibit, the success of these types of emerging technologies.
As verticals, such as Healthcare, rapidly adopt new bandwidth consuming technologies, there will be an associated increase in need for the broadband network to deliver the content in a low latency way. We highlight this use case and offer potential future networking solutions to complement the broadband network by focusing on the content rather than the endpoint connectivity.

Virtual Reality

You'll probably never go to Mars, travel back to the Stone Age, dive to the bottom of the sea, or sing onstage with the Rolling Stones. But Virtual Reality (VR) can make all these things almost as real as being there. VR has already produced a tremendous marketing space for interactive games, remote meetings, home medical, and many other both entertaining and practical uses. It has been popularized to the wide market by Google Cardboard, and even the New York Times now has their own VR app for smartphones. It's obvious to see that VR will impact almost every aspect of our lives in the near future.
VR, also known as immersive multimedia or computer-simulated reality, is a computer technology that replicates an environment, real or imagined, and simulates a user's physical presence and environment to allow for user interaction. Virtual realities artificially create sensory experience, which usually includes vision and hearing, but can also include touch and smell. VR technology creates a believable, interactive 3D world that allows you to feel you are really there.

Figure 2

VR constructs a "real" world for the user, that is, it catches the movement/operation of the user and produces a corresponding response, using devices to capture maneuvers, calculate output behavior and show the result to the user. Usually, a high end VR system includes several components:




Figure 3
1. Headsets
Head-mounted display (HMD) units use a small screen or a pair of screens that are worn in a helmet or a pair of glasses. Unlike a movie, where the director controls what the viewers sees, the HMD allows viewers to look at an image from various angles or change their field of view by simply moving their heads.
2. High end computing (CPU & GPU)
VR Engines require much more computing power than is available in a standard PC. One reason for the increased computing power is the complexity of the hardware and software to create a world that appears real. The images created by computer can be extremely complex and require minimum compute power such as a 3.4 GHz Intel Core i7 processor, 16 GB RAM, 2133 MHz memory speed, 2 TB SATA 7200rpm hard drive and a NVIDIA GTX 1070 graphics co-processor.
3. Audio units
The audio portion of virtual reality is transmitted through earbuds or high end ear phones . Audio may include voices, singing, noises of colliding objects—in short, any sound that can be recorded or created. And sounds that seem to come from above, below, or either side provide audio simulated in the real world.
4. Controllers
Controlllers allow the users to interact with the virtual world. For example, the user may pick up a virtual block, turn it over in a virtual hand, and put it on a virtual table. The computer then analyzes the corresponding information and projects this moving hand into the virtual reality. Magnetic tracking systems also are used to determine where the hand is in space in relation to the virtual scene, and in some cases, provide tactile feedback to the user.
5. Motion tracking
In products, such as the HTC Vive, infrared cameras are set up in a predetermined area to allow for what is referred to as "outside in" motion tracking that is tied to the VR experience. If you are walking up Mount Everest, for instance, in a virtual experience, you can actually walk in the real world and it will seem as if you are walking in the virtual world. Other systems provide "inside out" tracking using the headset itself to track motion. Motion is limited to space, however, so new innovations are occurring to provide full motion movement using treadmills and harnasses.
More sophisticated VR solutions are continually being developed for a more immersive experience including haptic suits which may track movement in the game and provide feedback through vibrations, temperature and pulses:

Figure 4
Another use for VR display could be the streaming of live or stored 360-degree video, perhaps integrated into a computer generated environment, as an entertainment experience.
VR is becoming more popular as higher-end equipment prices fall and lower-end solutions, such as Google Cardboard, are quite inexpensive if you already have a smartphone. As with videoconferencing, there will be a range of solutions, from inexpensive best-effort solutions to professional-quality cloud-based VR equipment and services, with service revenue for content and network providers.
The key actors would be expected to be:
• Network Provider: provides the QoE assured connectivity
• Content Provider: provides the VR content
• End User: consumes the VR content
There are two main business models:
1) NP to EU: per-stream enhanced-QoE service, on top of basic connectivity
2) NP to CP/OTT: statistically enhanced-QoE on VR delivery
Although some aspects of VR are becoming popular, especially for the home, there are still technical bottlenecks in the system that prevent it from creating a truly believable virtual world when connecting with multiple parties. A primary problem is network and local computing latency, or the tiny but perceptible delay between when you move your head in VR and the resulting changes in the image in front of you, that create a mismatch between the motion we feel (with our heads) and the image we see (with our eyes). This mismatch can make the user feel uncomfortable, even to point of dizziness or a headache. Unlike the real world where the latency is essentially zero, VR latency could never be zero because it always takes time for the computer to register your movements and draw the new images especially when traveling long distances.
Of course, computational latency, which increases with the complexity of the displayed images, can be improved through additional computational power, but this results in costlier equipment, and can require more processing power than is found in, for example, a typical smartphone that is running a VR application.
It is widely agreed that VR latency should be less than 20ms. This latency is the barrier for virtual reality applications. The industry has been investing much effort to solve this problem, and successfully lowering the latency to the safety range through advancements in the technology, primarily in the reality engine. Though now it's certainly not capable of solving all of the VR community's requirements, it's another substantial step forward.
High cost, especially for higher-end systems that try to reproduce a high-quality experience, is another barrier to success for VR. One way to reduce the cost of local VR computing, to make it more affordable and increase its popularity and general usage, is to offload the computations to a remote cloud-based server. But then, additional transmission- and network-based latency is being introduced into the system.
Since VR is a real-time and highly interactive application, VR using a remote computation server introduces stringent requirements for the underlying network, including high bandwidth, low latency, and low packet loss rate. The need for low latency has already been discussed. Regarding bandwidth requirements, higher-end VR systems typically use a display frame rate of 75-90 frames per second on dual HD or 4K displays, which can result in traffic rates four to eight times that for regular HD or 4K video respectively. Of course, low packet loss is required to prevent video freezes or dropouts.
Service initiation would most typically be initiated as a result of a user starting a VR session. The effect in the network would be to establish a path or flow on demand that can support the necessary QoS requirements.

Augmented Reality (AR)

Impact on the Network

Augmented reality/virtual reality (AR/VR) will provide a particularly unique demand on the network when used in social settings where multiple users interact with one another over the network. These types of multiparty use cases will include medical doctors jointly reviewing a patients case, field technicians reviewing a machine problem with headquarters, social gaming and friends virtually attending a concert or sporting event together. In order for the experience to be successful, the latency (both across the network and in the HMD) will need to be low:

Figure 6
A network with large bandwidth, low latency and high energy efficiency needs to be provided for VR. ThereThis perhaps could be expressed as Network requirements and refer to section 6.1 of the SD-377 source document and call out the values of the VR/AR application in the table, rather than generically to low latency, etc.
The values to be added are specifically: assured bandwidth, one way delay, delay variation, packet loss ratio, availability and also the security requirements.
This will provide guidance to implementers and help providers configure networks to provision network resources.
In addition it would be usefult to lign the traffic management requirements in alignment with the upcoming TM white paper. may never be an end to user's pursuit of immersive experiences. This is fully manifested in the development of ordinary video from SD to 4K. VR is rapidly developing and will soon enter the 2K or even 4K stage. Entry-level VR bandwidth of single program will consume 100 Mbit/s. Advanced VR will consume 400 Mbit/s and high end VR will require over 2 Gbit/s. It will become necessary for the dynamic processing and storage of this content to occur oned as the edge in addition to the cloud data center.
There are many proposals to help make the existing networks more efficient, including Hard TCP (to reserve AR/VR bandwidth and provide deterministic latency, Flex E (to provide much higher, non-standard, Ethernet bit rates), Edge Computing (to reduce the cloud processing latency), Information Centric Networking (ICN, to focus on content forwarding not host connectivity) and several others.
But the primary need, today, is high quality VR gear, a fast computer, and a fast low latency broadband connection. If the content, being watched in a VR environment, is 360 video, then the network requirements are reasonable.

Table 1

And for varying types of Virtual Reality (which goes much beyond 360 video) we have a starting chart to work with:

Relationship to Other Broadband Forum BAS Use CasesI added the relationship to other uses cases to have the paper to be part of a family served by BAS

The Broadband Forum has defined a number of consumer and business applications services that require a number of specific QoS/QoE requirements covering performance and security
These include

Definitions and Abbreviations

The following terminology is used throughout this Marketing Draft.

Abbreviations

This Marketing Draft uses the following abbreviations:

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End of Broadband Forum Marketing Draft MD-XXX