Performance Measurements of Virtual Reality Systems: Quantifying the Timing and Positioning Accuracy

We propose the very first non-intrusive measurement methodology for quantifying the performance of commodity Virtual Reality (VR) systems. Our methodology considers the VR system under test as a black-box and works with any VR applications. Multiple performance metrics on timing and positioning accuracy are considered, and detailed testbed setup and measurement steps are presented. We also apply our methodology to several VR systems in the market, and carefully analyze the experiment results. We make several observations: (i) 3D scene complexity affects the timing accuracy the most, (ii) most VR systems implement the dead reckoning algorithm, which incurs a non-trivial correction latency after incorrect predictions, and (iii) there exists an inherent trade-off between two positioning accuracy metrics: precision and sensitivity.