Virtual Reality: A Survey of Enabling Technologies and its Applications in IoT

Abstract: Virtual Reality (VR) has shown great potential to revolutionize the market by providing users immersive experiences with freedom of movement. Compared to traditional video streaming, VR is with ultra high-definition and dynamically changes with users' head and eye movements, which poses significant challenges for the realization of such potential. In this paper, we provide a detailed and systematic survey of enabling technologies of virtual reality and its applications in Internet of Things (IoT). We identify major challenges of virtual reality on system design, view prediction, computation, streaming, and quality of experience evaluation. We discuss each of them by extensively surveying and reviewing related papers in the recent years. We also introduce several use cases of VR for IoT. Last, issues and future research directions are also identified and discussed.