A Smartphone Thermal Temperature Analysis for Virtual and Augmented Reality

Abstract

Emerging virtual and augmented reality applications are envisioned to significantly enhance user experiences. An important issue related to user experience is thermal management in smartphones widely adopted for virtual and augmented reality applications. Although smartphone overheating has been reported many times, a systematic measurement and analysis of their thermal behaviors is relatively scarce, especially for virtual and augmented reality applications. To address the issue, we build a temperature measurement and analysis framework for virtual and augmented reality applications using a robot, infrared cameras, and smartphones. Using the framework, we analyze a comprehensive set of data including the battery power consumption, smartphone surface temperature, and temperature of key hardware components, such as the battery, CPU, GPU,and WiFi module. When a 360° virtual reality video is streamed to a smartphone, the phone surface temperature reaches near $39^{\circ} \mathrm{C}$. Also, the temperature of the phone surface and its main hardware components generally increases till the end of our 20 -minute experiments despite thermal control undertaken by smartphones, such as CPU/GPU frequency scaling. Our thermal analysis results of a popular AR game are even more serious: the battery power consumption frequently exceeds the thermal design power by 20-80 %, while the peak battery, CPU, GPU, and WiFi module temperature exceeds $45,70,70$, and $65^{\circ} \mathrm{C}$ respectively.