EE Colloquium: Wireless Networking for Personalized and Collaborative Virtual Reality

Abstract:  Virtual reality (VR) over wireless networks can provide an interactive and immersive experience for multiple users simultaneously and thus has many applications, especially in VR-based education/training. However, satisfactory personalized user experience in such wireless immersive services demands stringent performance requirements, including: (1) high-speed and high-resolution panoramic image rendering; (2) extremely low delay guarantees; and (3) seamless user experience. Besides the aforementioned requirements, collaborative user experience requires scalability of VR service. Existing VR systems heavily rely on various heuristic designs and do not efficiently exploit VR content commonality and its predictability, which impede their large-scale deployment. In this talk, we will talk about our network algorithm design towards providing both personalized and scalable collaborative VR experience over wireless networks. 

Bio: Bin Li is an associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the Pennsylvania State University. He received his Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from The Ohio State University (OSU) in 2014. Prior to joining Penn State, he was a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Coordinated Science Lab at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) from June 2014 to August 2016, and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical, Computer and Biomedical Engineering at the University of Rhode Island from August 2016 to July 2021.  His research focuses on the intersection of networking, machine learning, and system development, and their applications in networking for virtual/augmented reality, mobile edge computing, mobile crowd-learning, and Internet-of-Things (IoT). He received both the National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award and Google Faculty Research Award in 2020.