Why Today's Internet Cannot Support Tomorrow's Immersive Experiences: Insights from the NSF Workshop

Abstract

Immersive computing is poised to become a major paradigm for future human-computer interaction (HCI), enabling spatial and embodied experiences across applications such as education, healthcare, manufacturing, emergency response, and scientific discovery. However, today's Internet and computing infrastructure were not designed for real-time, multi-user, sensor-rich, and privacy-sensitive immersive applications. They require coordination across sensing, representation, compression, networking, edge/cloud computing, rendering, security/privacy, and human experience. This report summarizes key findings from the NSF Workshop on Networking and Systems Challenges in Immersive Computing. The workshop brought together researchers from networking, systems, extended reality (XR), artificial intelligence (AI), graphics, HCI, security, privacy, and applications to identify challenges and opportunities. We conclude that immersive computing cannot be enabled by isolated advances in network bandwidth, device capabilities, AI models, or rendering alone. The field needs end-to-end architectures that adapt to user behavior, application requirements, resource constraints, and social expectations. We organize the agenda into six themes: networked systems for immersive computing; real-time edge-cloud orchestration for XR applications; AI for immersive experiences; privacy, security, and trust in XR systems; human-centered design and user experience in XR; and scalable infrastructure, testbeds, and open ecosystems for XR. We further identify key research questions, future trends, risks, ten-year success metrics, and action items for academia, industry, government, and research community. The report calls for coordinated investment in open platforms, reproducible benchmarks, privacy-preserving systems, and human-centered evaluation to build trustworthy, scalable, and broadly impactful infrastructure.

arXiv comment32 pages, 6 figures