Adve says, "Today, the battery lives of the systems we have on the market are low. For example, the Apple Vision Pro is about two hours, and that's with a battery pack in your pocket. Plus, the weight of these headsets is about 500 grams, and they soon get uncomfortable. Our vision is for comfortable use throughout the day, just like my glasses. I don't think about my glasses on my face. I wear them all day long. I need them all day long, and that's where we want to go with our vision."
The key to comfortable all day wear devices is to reduce their power consumption. But power constraints limit the computation that a headset can do. Adve explains, "There is orders of magnitude of gap between what we have today and where we want to be. Today's headsets use about 20 to 30W of power, but ideally, for comfort, we want to be at a few hundred milliwatts while still providing rich experiences. One way to get there is to move computation from the headset to another device. In the near term, that device might be like your phone in your pocket. But ideally, we don't want to be carrying multiple devices, and so we want to move computation to the cloud. This creates a distributed XR system and brings new challenges with higher latency and limited bandwidth."
A futuristic immersive experience that motivates Adve comes from her role as a teacher. "When I teach, I often ask my students who attend in person what motivates them to come to class. They say coming to class keeps them engaged. They ask questions, and really like the experience and learn a lot. It would be wonderful if we could provide the same experience to students in remote locations who take our courses online. Using immersive technologies, they could reconstruct the classroom in their homes and transport their virtual selves to the physical classroom, enabling interactions with other students like they were together in person. These technologies can transform how we educate and train."
But doing this at scale is quite futuristic right now. "A lot of things need to happen for it to come together, and that's what I mean by orders of magnitude gaps that need to be overcome. We are chipping away at them with our work."
Adve points to other XR uses. She is excited to collaborate with Carle Illinois College of Medicine and Jump ARCHES Simulation Center for use of XR in medical training and healthcare procedures.
"A lot of this work is in the context of our IMMERSE Center for Immersive Computing," Adve notes, "which is a campus-wide center. I'm very excited about bringing together departments and units across campus so that we can leverage the technology work in the context of the needs of the application."