Ada: A Distributed, Power-Aware, Real-Time Scene Provider for XR

Real-time scene provisioning-reconstructing and delivering scene data to requesting XR applications during runtime-is central to enabling spatial computing in modern XR systems. However, existing solutions struggle to balance latency, power and scene fidelity under XR device constraints, and often rely on designs that are either closed, application-specific designs, or both. We present Ada, the first open distributed, power-aware, application-agnostic real-time scene provisioning system. Through computation offloading along with algorithmic and system innovations, Ada provides high-fidelity scenes with stable performance across all evaluated scene sizes and with low power consumption. To isolate the benefits of Ada's algorithmic and design innovations over the closest prior work [82], which is on-device and CPU-based, we configure a comparable on-device, CPU-based variant of Ada (AdaLocal-CPU). We show this variant achieves up to 6.8× lower scene request latency and higher scene fidelity compared to the prior work. Furthermore, Ada's final distributed GPU-accelerated implementation reduces latency by an additional 2×, highlighting the benefits of GPU acceleration and distributed computing. Additionally, Ada also lowers the incremental power cost of scene provisioning by 24% compared to the best on-device variant (AdaLocal-GPU). Finally, Ada flexibly adapts to diverse latency, power, scene fidelity, and network bandwidth requirements.