CoMIC: A Collaborative Mobile Immersive Computing Infrastructure for Conducting Multi-User XR Research

While existing research on immersive technologies such as virtual, augmented, and mixed reality has been shifting from improving the quality of experience (QoE) of a single user to multi-user scenarios, which are naturally required by the burgeoning Metaverse, there is little work on building the underlying infrastructure to support multi-user immersive applications, especially for geo-distributed users. In this position paper, we propose a research infrastructure, dubbed CoMIC, to fill this critical gap, by offering a collaborative, visual-first, and hologram-based computing space and a QoE-driven, multi-site, and immersive communication framework. With its rudimentary prototype, we demonstrate the effectiveness of CoMIC through a case study of multi-user volumetric video streaming over mmWave. We conclude this paper with a discussion of numerous unique opportunities that can be enabled by CoMIC.