Ada Wins Best Paper at IEEE ISMAR 2025

Ada: A Distributed, Power-Aware, Real-Time Scene Provider for XR was awarded Best Paper at the IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR 2025) and selected for publication in the IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG). The work introduces the first open, power-aware, distributed system for real-time scene reconstruction and delivery in XR.

Real-time scene reconstruction and delivery, or scene provisioning, is central to spatial computing—enabling XR applications to perceive, understand, and interact with the real world in real time. Our system, Ada, allows XR applications on lightweight XR devices to access high-fidelity scenes in real time by offloading heavy 3D reconstruction and scene extraction to a remote server, achieving low latency and low on-device power. Ada also provides adaptive tuning to balance latency, power, fidelity, and bandwidth across diverse applications and system conditions.

Key highlights:

• First open general-purpose scene provisioning system to achieve low latency, low power, and high fidelity simultaneously

• Distributed computing with novel device–server co-design and efficient transmission for fast, accurate, low-bandwidth depth and mesh data

• 6.8× faster and higher fidelity than prior state-of-the-art

• 24% lower device power than the best on-device Ada variant

• Open-source integration in the ILLIXR testbed

Ada achieves real-time, high-resolution scene provisioning with substantially lower latency and power consumption. The project, a collaboration between the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Meta Reality Labs, represents a major step toward practical, scalable XR experiences and provides key insights for future XR-class architectures.