Design of a Computational Offloading Platform for Immersive Experiences in Digital Culture

Abstract

Recent advances in three-dimensional (3D) media delivery technologies, such as Augmented and Mixed Reality, have paved the way towards the realization of high-quality immersive experiences in digital culture applications. Nowadays, these services play a crucial role in cultural heritage dissemination, transforming visitors from passive spectators into proactive culture caretakers and content creators. Nevertheless, they demand significant computational resources and are subject to low delay tolerances, that are generally difficult to acquire via standard mobile devices. Under this scope, the current paper deals with the preliminary design of a hybrid cloud/edge computing platform for the support of digital culture applications. The goal is to recognize computationally intensive services that are to be offloaded based on their resource and time criticality to the cloud or edge respectively, and offer constant guarantees regarding the visitors’ Quality of Experience. The use case of Byzantine Monuments and Churches is also reported to better contextualize the approach and present the platform’s layering and data flow.