HoloSync: Frame Synchronisation for Multi-Source Holographic Teleportation Applications

Abstract

Live holographic teleportation is an emerging media application that allows Internet users to communicate in a fully immersive environment. One distinguishing feature of such an application is the ability to teleport multiple objects from different network locations into the receiver's field of view at the same time, mimicking the effect of group-based communications in a common physical space. In this case, live teleportation frames originated from different sources must be precisely synchronised at the receiver side to ensure user experiences with eliminated perception of motion misalignment effect. For the very first time in the literature, we quantify the motion misalignment between remote sources with different network contexts in order to justify the necessity of such frame synchronisation operations. Based on this motivation, we propose HoloSync, a novel edge-computing-based scheme capable of achieving controllable frame synchronisation performances for multi-source holographic teleportation applications. We carry out systematic experiments on a real system with the HoloSync scheme in terms of frame synchronisation performances in specific network scenarios, and their sensitivity to different control parameters.