US research brings high quality VR to smartphones

The advance from Purdue University in the US also provides new opportunities for enterprise, education, health care and entertainment applications.

The system, called Coterie, uses a novel way to manage the challenging task of rendering high-resolution virtual scenes to satisfy the stringent quality-of-experience (QoE) of VR. Those include high frame rate and low motion-to-photon latency, which is the delay between the movement of the user's head or game controller and the change of the VR device's display reflecting the user's movement. The new approach enables 4K-resolution VR on commodity mobile devices and allows up to 10 players to interact in the same VR application simultaneously.

"We have worked to create VR technology that someone can use on a typical smartphone with a Wi-Fi connection," said Professor Y. Charlie Hu, who led the Purdue team. "Our solution not only allows multiple players to participate in a VR game at the same time, but also provides a better and more cost-effective option for single-player use."