DiOS—An Extended Reality Operating System for the Metaverse

Driven by the recent improvements in device and networks capabilities, extended reality (XR) is becoming more pervasive; industry and academia alike envision ambitious projects, such as the metaverse. However, XR is still limited by the current architecture of mobile systems. This article makes the case for an XR-specific operating system (XROS). An XROS integrates hardware-support, computer vision algorithms, and XR-specific networking as the primitives supporting XR technology. These primitives represent the physical–digital world as a single shared resource among applications. Such an XROS allows for the development of coherent and system-wide interaction and display methods, systematic privacy preservation on sensor data, and performance improvement while simplifying application development.