Demystifying Web-based Mobile Extended Reality Accelerated by WebAssembly
Kaiyan Liu, Nan Wu, Bo Han · 2023
By combining various emerging technologies, mobile extended reality (XR) blends the real world with virtual content to create a spectrum of immersive experiences. Although Web-based XR can offer attractive features such as better accessibility, cross-platform compatibility, and instant updates, its performance may not be on par with its standalone counterpart. As a low-level bytecode, WebAssembly has the potential to drastically accelerate Web-based XR by enabling near-native execution speed. However, little has been known about how well Web-based XR performs with WebAssembly acceleration. To bridge this crucial gap, we conduct a first-of-its-kind systematic and empirical study to analyze the performance of Web-based XR expedited by WebAssembly on four diverse platforms with five different browsers. Our measurement results reveal that although WebAssemlby can accelerate different XR tasks in various contexts, there remains a substantial performance disparity between Web-based and standalone XR. We hope our findings can foster the realization of an immersive Web that is accessible to a wider audience with various emerging technologies.