A Subjective Study on User Perception Aspects in Virtual Reality

Abstract

Three hundred and sixty degree video is becoming more and more popular on the Internet. By using a Head-Mounted Display, 360-degree video can render a Virtual Reality (VR) environment. However, it is still a big challenge to understand Quality of Experience (QoE) of 360-degree video since user experience during watching 360-degree video is a very complex phenomenon. In this paper, we aim to investigate four QoE aspects of 360-degree video, namely, perceptual quality, presence, cybersickness, and acceptability. In addition, four key QoE-affecting factors of encoding parameters, content motion, rendering device, and rendering mode are considered in our study. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that covers a large number of factors and QoE aspects of 360-degree video. In this study, a subjective experiment is conducted using 60 video versions generated from three original 360-degree videos. Based on statistical analysis of the obtained results, various findings on the impacts of the factors on the QoE aspects are provided. In particular, regarding the impacts of encoding parameters, it is found that the difference of QoE is negligible between video versions encoded at 4 K and 2.5 K resolutions. Also, it is suggested that 360-degree video should not be encoded at HD resolution or lower when watching in VR mode using Head Mounted Display. In addition, the bitrate for good QoE varies widely across different video contents. With respect to the content motion factor, its impact is statistically significant on the perceptual quality, presence, and cybersickness. In a comparison of two rendering device sets used in this study, there is no statistically significant difference found for the acceptability and cybersickness. However, the differences of the perceptual quality and presence are indicated to be statistically significant. Regarding the rendering mode, a comparison between VR and non-VR modes is also conducted. Although the non-VR mode always achieves higher perceptual quality scores and higher acceptability rates, more than a half of the viewers prefer the VR mode to the non-VR mode when watching versions encoded at the resolutions of fHD or higher. By contrast, the non-VR mode is preferred at the HD resolution.