Highly Immersive Telepresence with Computation Offloading to Multi-Access Edge Computing

COVID-19 has raised the demand for non-contact interactions in most areas of human activities. One of the core technologies for non-contact interactions is telepresence that can provide truly immersive interactions between remote participants. Many telepresence approaches rely on avatar technology to provide realistic and immersive telepresence experience and hence a lot of research has been conducted on the topic of avatar creation. However, it is difficult to host avatar technology on user devices because of extremely large data and computation requirements. Cloud-based services can provide sufficient resources to manage avatars but the physical distance between the user and the cloud server introduces latencies that adversely affect service quality. In this paper, we propose a telepresence system design suitable for the multi-access edge computing (MEC) environment that can provide large processing power for avatar management with low latency so as to offer immersive telepresence experiences with high quality avatars.