Overview of motion-to-photon latency reduction for mitigating VR sickness

Abstract

For several years, virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) technologies have been improving. However, some hurdles remain that slow down the distribution of VR and AR devices, such as head-mounted display (HMD), and related consumer content. One issue is VR motion sickness, which has been experienced by users using 360 degree VR content via HMD. This paper discusses the related international standardization work that classifies the factors causing VR sickness, and proposes the process for VR sickness level evaluation. Among the factors causing VR sickness, many research institutes regard minimizing MTP (Motion-to-Photon) latency as the key enabler to mitigate VR sickness. Thus, this paper introduces research trends of MTP latency measurement and MTP latency mitigation. This paper categorizes the research on MTP latency measurement into 2 categories of hardware-based approach and software code-level approach. The 2 approaches have different pros and cons depending on use-case, purpose, and architecture of each multimedia system. The pros and cons are addressed in this paper. Additionally, the research on mitigating MTP latency with diverse strategies such as proactive computing, caching, and edge server technology is explained, and compared to conventional technologies, shows improved performance.