Keynote at DAC 2024

Sarita Adve delivered a keynote speech at the Design Automation Conference (DAC) 2024, exploring the future of immersive computing. She shared groundbreaking insights and integrative research approaches designed to bridge the gap between current and desired immersive systems, aiming to foster a better world through technology. Slides are available here. 

Abstract
Immersive computing (including virtual, augmented, mixed, and extended reality, metaverse, digital twins, and spatial computing) has the potential to transform most industries and human activities to create a better world for all. Delivering on this potential, however, requires bridging an orders of magnitude gap between the power, performance, and quality-of-experience attributes of current and desirable immersive systems. With a number of conflicting requirements - 100s of milliwatts of power, milliseconds of latency, unbounded compute to realize realistic sensory experiences – no silver bullet is available.  Further, the true goodness metric of such systems must measure the subjective human experience within the immersive application. This talk calls for an integrative research agenda that drives codesigned end-to-end systems from hardware to system software stacks to foundation models spanning the end-user device/edge/cloud, with metrics that reflect the immersive human experience, in the context of real immersive applications. I will discuss work pursuing such an approach as part of the IMMERSE Center for Immersive Computing which brings together immersive technologies, applications, and human experience, and in the ILLIXR project based on an open-source end-to-end system to democratize immersive systems research.