Virtual Reality system and immersion

New upcoming multimedia technologies like virtual reality via HMD (head mounted displays) can be regarded in the same way as parts of a comprehensive system. Investigations and stud­ies are showing that the quality of VR systems depends on the proper combination of sense stim­ulations like visual, acoustical and sense of balance. If one or more of these stimulations are missing or badly performed, moving sickness and fatigue feelings appears. On the other hand a proper and realistic sense-stimulation supports the feeling of Immersion.

In the following list an overview about the sense – related components are given for some of the most important VR setups.

For most of these quality aspects several investigation methods are known. We use these methods continuously in our daily work for other product groups. In many cases sub­jective ratings from human test panels are necessary for a comprehensive and practical evalua­tion.

• SEEING  (HMD - Head mounted display, Cave, Screens)
• HEARING  (Headphones, Speakers, Subwoofer, Vibration Shaker)
• FEELING  (Motion Simulation, self gernerated movements, touching, wind, temperature)
• SMELLING (Odour Generator)

BBM Testlab currently makes own investigations based on a bicyle simulator, which can adapt the strenght of movements and slope during some kind of downhill simulation. Further parameters besides of visual content are the type of HMD and the wind speed by a fan.

We use this results in order to develop a matrix of VR performance components with their characteris­tics and limitations and will perform some perception based test methods and their evaluation on different VR solutions. This can be based on computer graphics content as well as real 360° sphere video content.

Furthermore it is planned to collect these evaluations to a combined result in order to get some kind of “immersion-factor” for a specific VR situation for bicyclists. The aim is to define the nec­essary demands of sense stimulation like movements and minimum quality aspects for the transmission systems like HMD screens to fulfil a desired immersion level.