A New Era for Web AR with Mobile Edge Computing

Dedicated device-based and app-based augmented reality (AR) solutions have inherent limitations regarding cross-platform, pervasive AR application provisioning. Web-based AR (web AR), a promising lightweight and cross-platform approach to AR, is gaining increasing attention owing to its extensive application areas. However, for computationally intensive AR applications, the weak computational efficiency of current web browsers seriously hampers applications of web AR on a large scale. The browser + cloud approach suffers from the high-latency dilemma. Now, with the emerging 5G networks, mobile edge computing (MEC) promises to greatly reduce network latency (even to 1 ms) by deploying applications at the network edge closer to users, which provides an opportunity for performance improvement of web AR. In this article, the authors envision that the application of MEC has the potential to bring web AR into a new era. Specifically, an MEC-oriented web AR solution is first proposed, followed by the design and deployment details. The authors also discuss future directions aimed at using MEC to tackle the performance issues of web AR in 3G, 4G, and 5G networks.