Virtual Reality for the Tactile Internet

The Tactile Internet envisions that in the near future we will be able to control remotely located infrastructure (such as robots) in real-time. This will be done only with the help of wearable sensors and a video to monitor the application. Examples of applications are tele-health or online gaming. Virtual Reality (VR) video streaming is best-suited to fulfill the immersive visual feedback loop. However, integrating VR in the Tactile Internet, which requires real-time transmissions, imposes improvements in the technology. The reason for this is that VR technologies require very high bitrates (~50Mbps) and suffer from large network delays (in order of the 100 ms). Additionally, it is very difficult to synchronize VR videos with the other sensors, and to assess how the services are perceived by users. The objective of this project is to tackle the challenges to bring VR up to speed with the Tactile Internet paradigm. We envision two research lines. First, in order to improve the transmission delays and bitrates, we will explore the limitations of the current transmission systems, optimize them and provide with alternatives. Second, we will focus on the multi-modal sensor integration and quality control of the systems to provide a real-time assessment of how the users are
perceiving the services. All the methods proposed here will be evaluated both by measurements (delay, bandwidth,...) and by subjective feedback.