Abstract: Augmented, Virtual, and Mixed Reality, collectively known as Extended Reality (XR), are transformative technologies impacting diverse areas from education and science to social interaction and entertainment. However, modern XR systems face significant challenges in performance, power efficiency, and quality, hindering the realization of their full potential.

To democratize architecture and systems research in XR, we developed ILLIXR (Illinois Extended Reality Testbed), a fully open-source, end-to-end XR system. ILLIXR includes state-of-the-art XR components, integrated through a modular, multithreaded runtime framework. ILLIXR is compliant with OpenXR, allowing it to support applications developed with popular game engines such as Godot and Unreal.

ILLIXR also provides extensive metrics for both component- and system-level performance and quality of experience, facilitating research in all areas pertaining to ASPLOS (e.g., heterogeneous system design, device-edge-cloud partitioning, scheduling, runtimes, ML and XR algorithms and implementations, etc.).

This tutorial will present an overview of the XR domain, a deep dive into ILLIXR’s components and runtime, and a hands-on demonstration of setup, build, and use of ILLIXR with real applications. It will also highlight recently added features in ILLIXR, including remote-assisted XR, new user interfaces, and several neural algorithms.