Abstract
Wireless virtual reality (VR) offers a seamless user experience but has to cope with higher sensitivity to temporal impairments induced on the wireless link. Apart from bandwidth dynamics and latency, video freezes and their lengths are important temporal performance indicators that impact on the quality of experience (QoE) of networked VR applications and services. This paper reports an experimental study that focuses on the VR video frame freeze length characteristics of a wireless VR solution. A comprehensive measurement campaign using a commercial TPCAST wireless VR solution with an HTC Vive head-mounted display was conducted to obtain real VR video traces. The number of detected freezes and freeze intensities are reported both accumulated over four room quadrants as well as for each of the four quadrants subject to six transmitter-receiver distances. The statistical analysis of the VR video traces of the different experiments includes histograms of the freeze lengths and cumulative complementary histograms of the freeze length. The results of this analysis offer insights into the density of the underlying distributions of the measured data, illustrate the impact of the room topology on the freeze characteristics, and suggest the statistical modeling of the freeze characteristics as exponential and geometric distributions. The statistical models of the freeze characteristics may be included in wireless VR simulators supporting the development of physical layer, medium access layer, and higher layer functionalities. They also may serve as network-disturbance models for VR QoE studies, e.g., generating realistic freeze events in wireless VR stimuli.
Highlights
Wireless virtual reality (VR) offers a seamless user experience by removing the restricted mobility of conventional wired VR headsets
This experimental study has provided a statistical analysis and statistical modeling of VR video freeze characteristics measured in a commercial TPCAST wireless VR solution together with an HTC Vive HMD
While bandwidth and latency characteristics have been extensively reported in literature for a variety of testbeds, this experimental study advances on the understanding of temporal disturbances with respect to video freezes and their lengths which both affect the quality of experience (QoE) of networked VR applications
Summary
Wireless virtual reality (VR) offers a seamless user experience by removing the restricted mobility of conventional wired VR headsets. The greater freedom of movement offered by wireless VR allows users to more conveniently immerse in a virtual world which in turn results in improved quality of experience (QoE) The delivery of such VR video services over networks requires data rates of ≥1.6 Gbps [1] depending on the video resolution and anticipated level of interaction with the virtual world. The network contribution to this MTP latency budget needs to be significantly improved to guarantee satisfactory QoE. To accommodate such high performance wireless data applications in terms of throughput and latency, several standards have been developed and are being worked on regarding advanced wireless and cellular network technologies. Standardization of the required wireless connectivity takes place both in the field of wireless local area networks (WLAN), and broadband cellular networks such as fifth generation (5G), beyond fifth generation (B5G) and sixth generation (6G) networks
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