Page 23 - Kaleidoscope Academic Conference Proceedings 2022

EXPLORING THE REALVERSE:
BUILDING, DEPLOYING, AND MANAGING QOE IN XR COMMUNICATIONS

Pablo Pérez – eXtended Reality Lab, Nokia

ABSTRACT mediated by the system. Our approach to immersive
communications, on the other hand, is based on the same idea
Immersive communication based on extended Reality (XR) is from which the telephone and the video call were born: the
foreseen to be the next step in human communication. For that interaction between people through technology, which must
challenge, we propose the “Realverse”: an approach where be as transparent as possible, such that two physically distant
physically distant people can interact as if they were in the people can communicate and interact exactly as if they were
same physical space. This can be achieved by implementing together in the same place (as if one was visiting the other).
a distributed reality solution, including four fundamental We call this vision “Realverse”.
elements: remote presence, embodied interaction, visual Implementing the realverse translates into capturing and
communication, and shared immersion. In this paper we transmitting, in real time, the environment of one or more
describe our recent research and approach to this topic, as people, who are remote, and mixing them consistently with
well as its implications in terms of implementation, network the environment of the local person, so as to generate a single
architecture, and quality of experience. We also propose shared reality, composed of parts of the realities of each of the
some insights for future standardization efforts. participants in the conversation. This composition of realities
based on video captured and transmitted in real time is called
Keywords - 5G, distributed reality, extended reality, quality Distributed Reality (DR) [5].
of experience The study of the realverse (or DR) is interesting from two
points of view. In the first place because, in the same way
1. INTRODUCTION that voice and video calls have established themselves as two
of the main communications applications today, the “XR call”
In recent years there has been a strong increase in interest will be the natural evolution of them, once that the necessary
in Virtual, Augmented and extended Reality (VR/AR/XR) technology reaches a sufficient level of accessibility. And,
applications, catalyzed in part by the company Meta’s on the other hand, because DR is a variant of XR focused
commitment to developing new applications and experiences on communications between systems, which therefore makes
around the concept of the metaverse. This interest is also intensive use of communications networks. The analysis
fueled by the wide availability of moderately priced VR and of the realverse requirements will allow us to design and
AR devices, such as Meta Quest, HTC Vive, Hololens or dimension the 5G and beyond-5G (B5G) networks necessary
MagicLeap. This wave of technology, whose beginning to support future XR-based services.
we can date in the development of the Oculus Rift at the In this paper we will describe the fundamental building
end of 2012, was also one of the leitmotifs that supported blocks of a realverse implementation, as well as the different
the commitment to 5G networks, in anticipation of the solutions that exist, or that we have researched, for each of
connectivity needs (especially bitrate) that would be needed. them. We will also describe the implications that it has for
The particularity of the wave of interest around the metaverse the network, and which are the main network constraints
is the application of XR technologies fundamentally for regarding the Quality of Experience (QoE). Finally, we will
immersive communication, defined as “exchanging natural discuss the opportunities that it opens for standardization.
social signals with remote people, as in face-to-face meetings,
and/or experiencing remote locations (and having the people 2. BUILDING BLOCKS OF THE REALVERSE
there experience you) in ways that suspend disbelief in being
there” [1]. Immersive communication has already had a The key psychological feature which allows the existence of
strong presence in the research community for the last decade, metaverses, realverses, and any other XR paradigm, is the
studied from the perspective of telepresence [2], Social sense of presence. From the early experiments with virtual
VR [3], or within the framework of Computer-Supported reality systems in the 1980s and 1990s, it was discovered that
Cooperative Work (CSCW) [4]. the technology created in the users the illusion of “being
Despite the fact that there are as many versions of the there”, within the virtual environment. This perceptual
metaverse as there are people talking about it, most of the illusion is called “sense of presence” or simply “presence”,
visions that are proposed are usually based on the interaction defined as “the subjective experience of being in one place or
of avatars, virtual or realistic, inside a highly personalized environment, even when one is physically situated in another”
virtual space. In this sense, the interaction between people [6]. The sense of presence elicited by XR environments is
happens in the metaverse, and is strongly (and very actively) closely tied to the psychological process of consciousness; it

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