ILLIXR: An Open Testbed to Enable Extended Reality Systems Research

Abstract

We present Illinois Extended Reality testbed (ILLIXR), the first fully open-source XR system and research testbed. ILLIXR enables system innovations with end-to-end co-designed hardware, compiler, OS, and algorithms, and driven by end-user perceived Quality-of-Experience (QoE) metrics. Using ILLIXR, we provide the first comprehensive quantitative analysis of performance, power, and QoE for a complete XR system and its individual components. We describe several implications of our results that propel new directions in architecture, systems, and algorithms research for domain-specific systems in general, and XR in particular.