An Investigation of User Experiences on VR Videos in a Home Environment

As a typical 5G service, VR service quality has become the focus of attention of the network operators. Both 5G and Gigabit home broadband have the characteristics of high bandwidth and low latency, and could theoretically provide a good network support to the VR video playback, especially to 360-degree panoramic videos. In the current study, we explored the VR video playback quality and users’ viewing feelings under 5G and Gigabit home broadband network in a home environment. Our findings indicated that the video playback quality under 5G network was significantly lower than that under Gigabit home broadband network. In addition, we found that users were more sensitive to stalling frequency during watching, which considered to be highly related to the value of the network downlink rate. Our findings implied that the stability of 5G network performance should be further improved to better support the applications that require the network with high bandwidth and low latency.