Though the underlying technology and concepts defining Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) have been in development for decades, advancements in graphics, computing, sensors, and networking have finally placed this emerging industry on the cusp of mass-market adoption. As the supporting hardware and infrastructure continue to develop, immersive systems have the potential to inspire a multi-billion-dollar industry, and even be as game-changing as the advent of the PC. However, despite unprecedented development and investment in the past few years, the AR/VR industry is still facing the substantial difficulty of deploying high-quality systems with the mobility and robust user experience necessary to pull this technology from the pages of science fiction into our mainstream reality.
The challenges of delivering the wealth of rich and compelling experiences that will give this new medium an enduring reason to exist are decidedly nontrivial. Immersive and interactive graphical applications require extraordinary levels of computing power relative to traditional forms of media and interaction. Even the most superior mobile AR/VR hardware currently available is suffering from limited battery life, overheating, and insufficient computing capabilities – challenges that we believe will persist throughout the next decade. Mobile-driven AR/VR engineers are eager to harness the power of cloud computing and alleviate the strain placed on end-user devices by offloading computationally-intensive tasks to powerful remote servers. However, they have thus far found network bandwidth and latency constraints to be prohibitive.
