V-Light: Leveraging Edge Computing For The Design of Mobile Augmented Reality Games

We explore the future of synchronous, multiplayer mobile AR gaming through our game V-Light, which extends current mobile AR game capacities using edge computing. Mobile AR games are currently limited by on-board processing power, while offloading operations to the cloud introduces high latency costs. This is a critical issue for games needing real-time response to player input. V-Light demonstrates how mobile AR games can leverage the power of edge computing, bringing computational resources closer to the user, keeping latency low and bandwidth high. We share our development toolkit, analyze the design and development of V-Light through the lens of an existing model for shared-world mobile AR, and demonstrate that edge computing can provide a "time machine" that lets game designers prototype mobile AR games for devices that do not yet exist.