Virtual and Augmented Reality: Improved User Experience through a Service Oriented Infrastructure

Service Oriented Infrastructures allow for on-demand provision of Information and Communication Technologies assets. What virtual environments require from such infrastructures refers to the offered Quality of Service (QoS) levels, which have direct impact on the end users experience. In this paper, we describe a new approach to improve the user experience, with regard to QoS, of collaborative Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) working sessions. One of the main issues that have to be addressed in such a use case is the requirement for keeping QoS with regards to real-time of the shared multimedia content of the AR. Therefore we adapted our application to a new and innovative real-time enabled framework for service-based infrastructures, implemented within the framework of the IRMOS EU project. This framework provides the necessary guarantees for successful collaborative VR and AR sessions as derived from the desired user experience. We also demonstrate the operation of the implemented framework and evaluate its effectiveness to the collaborative Virtual and Augmented Reality scenario.