A Study on Energy Efficiency in Edge-assisted VR Applications with Meta Quest 2 for Disaster Management

Virtual reality (VR) is a technology that has the potential to innovate whole sectors as well as the way we interact with digital environments. AR and VR devices are a perfect way to gain knowledge, information, and to practice operation plans during, before, and after a disaster took place, exploiting their capabilities. VR headsets like the Meta Quest 2 allow to perform rendering of applications locally or exploit the offloading to a Server in the cloud, and, in a disaster management scenario, the energy consumption of the device is a fundamental knowledge in order to make rational choices on which of the two types of rendering to perform. In this paper, we investigate the energy efficiency of the Meta Quest 2 in both of the two rendering approaches performing tests based on a benchmark application developed in Unreal Engine. From the results of our experiments, we found that remote rendering, performed via AirLink, allowed us to obtain higher FPS and overall quality, as well as keep the device GPU and CPU usage at lower values than with the local rendering paradigm. However, from the energy efficiency perspective, test results showed that besides the lighter CPU and GPU work using the remote rendering approach, the energy consumption, in the overall execution, exceeds the one using the local rendering paradigm, because of the network communication with the server.