This is an executive summary of the report on The Future VR/AR Network -- Towards Virtual Human/Object Teleportation, the first Visioning Workshop on Networked Virtual and Augmented Reality Communications, held in Washington, DC on April 23-24. The event was sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF). Gold sponsors for the event were Adobe Research and the College of Engineering at the University of Alabama.

Virtual and augmented reality (VR/AR) hold tremendous potential to advance our society. Together with another pair of emerging technologies, 360° video and holographic video, they can suspend our disbelief of being at a remote location or having remote objects/people present in our immediate surrounding, akin to virtual human/object teleportation. Presently limited to offline operation and synthetic content and targeting gaming and entertainment, VR/AR are expected to reach their potential when deployed online and with real remote scene content, enabling novel applications in disaster relief, the environmental sciences, transportation, and quality of life. Networked VR/AR applications will play a major role in the envisioned/emerging global Internet of Things framework and are expected to represent the foundation of the anticipated 5G tactile Internet ecosystem. However, there are considerable challenges ahead, in the form of technology limitations and infrastructure costs.

The objective of the workshop was to gather a forum of experts and interdisciplinary practitioners to help identify the most promising horizons to explore to address the above challenges and contemplate a community agenda that will integrate emerging threads of related work into collaboration. This report describes the topics discussed at the workshop and summarizes the key points of the discussions. Material related to the workshop is available online on its website at www.jakov.org/NSF_NetworkedVRAR_Workshop.

There was strong agreement among the workshop participants that overcoming the present challenges and technology limitations is essential for enabling the next generation societal VR/AR applications. Similarly, there was uniform agreement that this will necessitate departing from traditional networking approaches that solely aim to increase data rates or lower transmission delays, as the performance gap between networked VR/AR requirements and present/upcoming networking technologies is only expected to increase. Instead, holistic solutions should be investigated that go beyond the traditional networking domain to closely integrate capture, coding, networking, and user navigation of VR/AR data.

There was strong consensus at the workshop that it is essential to invest now in research that aims to meet this objective. Moreover, steady investment should be made in developing publicly available benchmark datasets, source code, evaluation settings, and testbeds, to help accelerate such research and drive reproducibility and standardization, at the same time.

The workshop report can be accessed here Workshop Report.