Fall 2021 GRASP SFI: Anthony Rowe, Carnegie Mellon University, “Weaving the Next Web with Spatial Computing”

*This was a HYBRID Event with in-person attendance in Levine 307 and Virtual attendance via Zoom

ABSTRACT

Many have predicted the future of the Web to be the integration of Web content with the real-world through technologies such as augmented reality. This overlay of virtual content on top of the physical world, called the Spatial Web (in different contexts AR Cloud, MetaVerse, Digital Twin), holds promise for dramatically changing the Internet as we see it today, and has broad applications.

In this talk, I will give a brief background on mixed reality systems and then present on ARENA, a new Spatial Computing architecture being developed by the CONIX Research Center (a six-university collaboration funded by the semiconductor industry and DAPRA).  The ARENA is a multi-user and multi-application environment that simplifies the development of mixed reality applications. It allows cross-platform interaction with 3D content that can be generated by any number of network-connected agents (human or machine) in real-time. It is network transparent in that users and data can execute and migrate seamlessly (and safely) across any number of connected computing resources that could include edge servers, in-network processing units, or end-user devices like headsets and mobile phones.  I will discuss several systems designed using ARENA with networked sensors and actuators for digitizing real-world environments. These projects expose a number of bottlenecks and future challenges we face when developing more immersive spatial computing systems.