Can My WiFi Handle the Metaverse? A Performance Evaluation Of Meta's Flagship Virtual Reality Hardware

Extending human societies into virtual space through the construction of a metaverse has been a long-term challenge in both industry and academia. Achieving this challenge is now closer than ever due to advances in computer systems, facilitating large-scale online platforms such as Minecraft and Roblox that fulfill an increasing number of societal needs, and extended reality (XR) hardware, which provides users with state-of-the-art immersive experiences. For a metaverse to succeed, we argue that all involved systems must provide consistently good performance. However, there is a lack of knowledge on the performance characteristics of extended reality devices. In this paper, we address this gap and focus on extended-and virtual-reality hardware. We synthesize a user-centered system model that models common deployments of XR hardware and their trade-offs. Based on this model, we design and conduct real-world experiments with Meta's flagship virtual reality device, the Quest Pro. We highlight two surprising results from our findings which show that (i) under our workload, the battery drains 15% faster when using wireless offloading compared to local execution, and (ii) the outdated 2.4 GHz WiFi4 gives surprisingly good performance, with 99% of samples achieving a frame rate of at least 65 Hz, compared to the 72 Hz performance target. Our experimental setup and data are available at https://github.com/atlarge-research/measuring-the-metaverse.