Multiplayer eXtended Reality: Use-cases, Applications and Networking - progress

PIs involved: Josep Blat, Boris Bellalta, Giovanni Geraci, Anders Jonsson, Sergi Jordà

MdM-supported staff: Ibrahim Aboushehada

Description & Goals: In this project, we aim to investigate on interactive eXtended Reality systems where multiple players are able interact with the virtual environment and between them by:

• Developing / Extending a new set of tools and applications able to support both collaborative creation and experience playing in the XR environments.

• Designing new communication network protocols and mechanisms to support the requirements of these tools and applications, with particular focus on wireless access.

Achievements and High-lights:

During the first two years of the project we have been working on:

Developing Rooms – An XR Experience Creation Tool: Rooms is an open-source XR content creation toolkit currently in development, designed to make 3D creation more accessible by leveraging the intuitive nature of VR motion controls. It can be downloaded from: https://github.com/upf-gti/rooms

Improving Wi-Fi to Support Multiplayer VR Streaming Applications: We are investigating Wi-Fi capabilities to sustain the high throughput, low latency, and high reliability required to support seamless interaction in Virtual Worlds. Technologies under study include Wi-Fi 7 Multi-Link Operation and Wi-Fi 8 Multi-AP Coordination.

Designing, Implementing, and Testing NeSt-VR: To overcome Wi-Fi capacity fluctuations, we have designed, implemented, and tested the Network-aware Step-wise Adaptive Bitrate algorithm for Virtual Reality streaming (NeSt-VR), demonstrating its ability to increase the number of connected users per AP and enhance connectivity robustness as players move around the area of interest.

Publications:

Nunez, David, Pasquale Imputato, Stefano Avallone, Malcolm Smith, and Boris Bellalta. "Enabling Reliable Latency in Wi-Fi 8 Through Multi-AP Joint Scheduling." IEEE Open Journal of the Communications Society (2025).

Casasnovas, Miguel, Ferran Maura, Isjtar Vandebroeck, Haryo Sukmawanto, Eric Joris, and Boris Bellalta. "NeSt-VR: An Adaptive Bitrate Algorithm for Virtual Reality Streaming over Wi-Fi." arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.14947 (2025).

Michaelides, Costas, Miguel Casasnovas, David Nunez, and Boris Bellalta. "Lessons Learned From a Large-Scale Virtual Reality Experience Over Wi-Fi." IEEE TechrXiv (2025)

Maura, Ferran, Miguel Casasnovas, and Boris Bellalta. "Experimenting with Adaptive Bitrate Algorithms for Virtual Reality Streaming over Wi-Fi." ACM Witech@Mobicom, 2024.

Shaabanzadeh, Seyedeh Soheila, Marc Carrascosa-Zamacois, Juan Sánchez-González, Costas Michaelides, and Boris Bellalta. "Virtual reality traffic prioritization for Wi-Fi quality of service improvement using machine learning classification techniques." Journal of Network and Computer Applications, 2024

Michaelides, Costas, and Boris Bellalta. "Responsive and Timely Virtual Reality Gaming: Which Frame Rate Should One Choose?." In 2024 IEEE Conference on Games (CoG), 2024.

Carrascosa-Zamacois, Marc, Lorenzo Galati-Giordano, Francesc Wilhelmi, Gianluca Fontanesi, Anders Jonsson, Giovanni Geraci, and Boris Bellalta. "Performance Evaluation of MLO for XR Streaming: Can Wi-Fi 7 Meet the Expectations?." IEEE CAMAD, 2024

Datasets at Zenodo community

• NeSt-VR: Adaptive Bitrate Algorithm for Virtual Reality Streaming over Wi-Fi

• VR Gaming Dataset

Next steps

In the following year, we plan:

• Continue investigating how Multi-AP Coordination can enable network-wide scheduling, and design suitable solutions for XR streaming in multiplayer scenarios.

• Study the interplay between application operation (e.g., game server, streamer), network latencies, and user responsiveness in multiplayer interactions in Virtual Worlds —investigating aspects such as the Peeker’s Advantage in cloud XR gaming.