Towards Cloud-Native Virtual Reality Applications: State-Of-The-Art and Open Challenges
José Santos · 2024
As Virtual Reality (VR) and Extended Reality (XR) technologies continue to evolve, exploring the deployment of these applications on distributed computing resources across the cloud continuum emerges as a promising research direction for improving immersive experiences. This paper reviews the current state-of-the-art on cloud-native VR applications, explaining the synergies between modern cloud infrastructures and recent advances in VR technology. In addition, the paper discusses an exhaustive list of existing literature to identify essential methodologies, architectures, and frameworks for the proper deployment of cloud-native VR applications. Furthermore, the paper analyzes the challenges associated with leveraging cloud infrastructures for VR and XR applications concerning its stringent requirements, including scalability, latency, and bandwidth. The paper highlights recent efforts on resource allocation and networking, aiming to meet the requirements of these low-latency applications in the cloud continuum. Lastly, the paper presents open challenges and research directions in the field, such as optimal containerization of VR components and efficient networking solutions towards reliable VR experiences. Addressing these challenges will lead to the widespread adoption of cloud-native VR applications, ultimately enabling more immersive, accessible, and scalable virtual experiences.