Internet of Things (IoT) for Seamless Virtual Reality Space: Challenges and Perspectives

This paper addresses a novel virtual reality (VR) system that is based on the real world in which we live. The ultimate goal is to implement it as though a VR user freely exists in a place. To this end, it is most important to reconstruct a VR space that provides six degree-of-freedom (DOF), namely, yaw, pitch, roll, surge, sway, and heave. However, most currently released VR services that are based on the real world limit users’ movements to three DOF. Even if the services support six DOF, most are highly complex and based on computer graphics. To overcome this problem, we first assume that there is a full Internet of things (IoT) infrastructure for collecting important data for VR space reconstruction. This assumption is realistic because many researchers expect that in the near future, IoT technology will lead to a world that connects not only people to people but also things to things. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end system architecture for the VR space that is based on the real world along with the element technologies that constitute the proposed system. This paper also includes a detailed survey of both conventional and emerging studies by other researchers.