Networked Musical XR: where’s the limit? A preliminary investigation on the joint use of point clouds and low-latency audio communication

As of today, the field of networked musical XR is in its infancy. While the next generation networks keep pushing the available bandwidth towards new frontiers, promoting the deployment of new services and applications, a limited amount of residual latency still hinders the possibility for musicians to seamlessly interact over the Internet. In fact, while audiovisual (and audio in particular) streaming has reached high performances, allowing for smooth interaction in many application scenarios such as video calls and dialogues, the study of tools to ensure a flawless immersive interplay experience among musicians is a rather unexplored area. This paper reports a preliminary investigation on a technical setup that couples a networked music performance system with an XR system, conceived to interconnect geographically displaced musicians. The setup we have envisaged has allowed us to identify the existing technical issues in current technologies used for networked musical XR. We discuss such issues and reason about possible future research directions in this area that should be covered to advance the current state of the art.