DEMO
Brandon McDonald, Yi-Zhen Tsai, Zheng Li, Michael Nebeling, Roland Graf, Hun Seok Kim, Jiasi Chen
University of Michigan
iGYM is an augmented reality exercise game for inclusive play that allows people with and without wheelchairs to participate equally in a soccer game with a projected virtual field and ball. However, previously iGYM required all players to be co-located and lacked capabilities for remote play. In this demo, we show a networked iGYM implementation that allows teams of geo-distributed users to play with each other.
A key challenge is meeting tight end-to-end latency requirements for interactive play over today’s best-effort Internet. We demonstrate a portable tabletop version of iGYM, implemented in Unity and ROS2, that uses a distributed authority model to keep track of ownership and propagate state updates about players, game objects, and scores to a remote server running on a cloud VM. Each client also performs application-layer latency compensation to compensate for network latency. The demo GUI allows attendees to inject artificial network delay, enable/disable application latency compensation, and observe the impact on gameplay and QoE metrics. This demo is part of an NSF-sponsored Breaking Low project, XRNet.