Exploration of comfort factors for virtual reality environments

Abstract

The democratization of virtual reality with head-mounted displays has brought a tremendous number of possible applications. However, depending on the used content and device, the user's quality of experience (QoE) and comfort may be significantly altered. It is thus very important to understand and model the factors involved in this process. Many authors investigated the potential aspects leading to sickness or discomfort in immersive environments, each of them targeting a set of specific factors (often a single one). Our goal in this paper is to understand how QoE and comfort are impacted by the virtual environment, observer's motion, scene complexity and rendering quality, based on psychophysical experiments. Our study starts by identifying a set of factors potentially affecting QoE. A reliable and reproducible experimental protocol is proposed to characterize their impact on the user. Base on a statistical study of the results, a better understanding of the nature of impact is achieved.