A Latency and Latency Jitter Simulation Framework with OSVR

Latency is a pressing problem in Virtual Reality (VR) applications. Low latencies are required for VR to reduce perceptual artifacts and cyber sickness. Latency jitter, i.e. variance in the pattern of latency, prevent coping mechanisms as users can’t adapt.Low latency is a fundamental timeliness requirement to reduce the potential risks of cyber sickness and to increase effectiveness, efficiency, and user experience of Virtual Reality Systems. The effects of uniform latency degradation based on mean or worst-case values are well researched. In contrast, the effects of latency jitter, the distribution pattern of latency changes over time has largely been ignored so far, although today’s consumer VR systems are extremely vulnerable in this respect.In this paper, we propose to create a model of latency and latency jitter with empirical distributions as well as a method of using those models to inject latency. The process of creating a latency model is demonstrated with an example of gathering and converting latency samples from an example application. We show how to simulate latency and motivate to use it in middleware to allow for less intrusive latency effect evaluations.