Enabling the Era of Immersive Computing
Thursday, June 27
Immersive computing (including virtual, augmented, mixed, and extended reality, metaverse, digital twins, and spatial computing) has the potential to transform most industries and human activities to create a better world for all. Delivering on this potential, however, requires bridging an orders of magnitude gap between the power, performance, and quality-of-experience attributes of current and desirable immersive systems. With a number of conflicting requirements - 100s of milliwatts of power, milliseconds of latency, unbounded compute to realize realistic sensory experiences – no silver bullet is available. Further, the true goodness metric of such systems must measure the subjective human experience within the immersive application. This talk calls for an integrative research agenda that drives codesigned end-to-end systems from hardware to system software stacks to foundation models spanning the end-user device/edge/cloud, with metrics that reflect the immersive human experience, in the context of real immersive applications. I will discuss work pursuing such an approach as part of the IMMERSE Center for Immersive Computing which brings together immersive technologies, applications, and human experience, and in the ILLIXR project based on an open-source end-to-end system to democratize immersive systems research.
ABOUT: Sarita Adve is the Richard T. Cheng Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign where she directs IMMERSE, the Center for Immersive Computing. Her research interests span the system stack, ranging from hardware to applications. Her work on the data-race-free, Java, and C++ memory models forms the foundation for memory models used in most hardware and software systems today. Her group released the ILLIXR (Illinois Extended Reality) testbed, an open-source extended reality system and research testbed, and launched the ILLIXR consortium to democratize XR research, development, and benchmarking. She is also known for her work on heterogeneous systems and software-driven approaches for hardware resiliency. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a fellow of the ACM and IEEE, and a recipient of the ACM/IEEE-CS Ken Kennedy award. As ACM SIGARCH chair, she co-founded the CARES movement, winner of the CRA distinguished service award, to address discrimination and harassment in Computer Science research events. She received her PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and her B.Tech. from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay.