Collaborative Research: CCRI: New: CoMIC: A Collaborative Mobile Immersive Computing Research Infrastructure for Multi-user XR

The last few years have witnessed the tremendous development of immersive technologies such as virtual, augmented, and mixed reality (VR, AR, and MR), which are often collectively referred to as extended reality (XR). While XR is deemed as the killer application of 5G and beyond, existing work has mainly focused on improving the quality of experience (QoE) for single-user scenarios, and there is limited research on exploring the underlying infrastructure to support emerging immersive applications, especially multi-user collaboration and interaction involving participants from geo-distributed locations. This project aims to design and develop the infrastructure for Collaborative Mobile Immersive Computing (CoMIC), which fills this critical gap and lays the technical foundation for realizing the grand vision of the Metaverse. The intellectual merit of CoMIC includes: (1) constructing a research infrastructure with both software and hardware components for advancing collaborative immersive computing and (2) serving the community by empowering innovative solutions of multi-user XR. CoMIC will develop a first-of-its-kind, open-accessible, and reconfigurable research infrastructure, which is naturally required by various use cases such as education, training, healthcare, and entertainment. It strives to offer a collaborative, visual-first, and hologram-based computing space and a QoE-driven, multi-site, and immersive communication framework by providing a shared environment for community users. CoMIC will be open to and support in-person visits of community users to facilitate their research projects. This project will create broader impacts on research infrastructure, education and training, societies, and economies, and broaden computing participation. Currently, the research and development of multi-user XR have been hindered because the underlying infrastructure with essential building blocks is still missing. CoMIC will timely bridge this critical gap and significantly speed up the realization of the Metaverse vision. The CoMIC platform offers a unique research opportunity for students and will be used to educate and train the next generation of researchers and engineers to master the key technologies and system design skills in immersive computing and advance the frontiers of science and engineering. This collaborative project brings together investigators from George Mason University and the University of Maryland to build the CoMIC infrastructure. Its remotely accessible and programmable robots mounted with XR devices and mmWave 5G edge networks can enable the comparison of different solutions in a consistent way. Users can download the CoMIC software to set up their own testbed, replace the CoMIC components in the reference implementation, and experiment with their own multi-user XR solutions. The website for this project is https://comic-xr.github.io/ This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.