The challenges to achieving a quality VR video experience.
We call it “virtual reality,” but the quality of the video we watch in VR headsets still doesn’t look real. Why is quality important? The feeling of really being there, called “spatial immersion,” is undermined by poor-quality video. Today, a great deal of VR video struggles to achieve immersion, because the poor quality distracts the viewer from the feeling of realism.
A true feeling of immersion comes from a combination of narrative and spatial immersion. Narrative immersion occurs when the viewer becomes emotionally invested in the story. Think about reading a novel or watching your favorite movie. You get so caught up in the story that you lose track of time. Spatial immersion occurs when the viewer becomes convinced by their senses that they are in a new space. When we are experiencing the sights and sounds of a new space and engaged with a compelling story, we can be powerfully moved. When we get these two ingredients right, we feel like we are truly in virtual reality.
There are no hard and fast rules for achieving narrative immersion. But we can define how to make a great-looking video that can fool your senses to create spatial immersion.
Many things that are called VR today fall far short of this goal. Services such as Google’s YouTube 360° and Facebook 360° have started to regularly offer 360-degree video content that simulates VR by displaying spherical video in a standard video player. 360-degree video is usually delivered through a web browser or on a simple device like Google Cardboard. But moving a mouse or holding up a cardboard box to your face requires hand-eye coordination that makes your brain take on tasks that interfere with immersion. Holding a smartphone up to your head is fine for a few minutes, but who wants to do that for a two-hour movie? A better experience comes from a head-mounted display that accurately and naturally tracks your movement.
A mobile phone-based headset like the popular Samsung Gear VR has good motion sensors and fast response times, and is capable of creating an immersive experience. There are many new headsets coming to the market in 2016. The Oculus Rift and HTC Vive are both tethered by cables to a PC, making use of the PC’s GPU capabilities to render 3D data quickly, and using additional sensors to track user motion in more directions than the Gear VR. Both the mobile and PC-tethered headsets have high-resolution displays with plenty of pixels, but when those displays are used to play video, the video quality tends to be poor.
Even with good display hardware in a headset, low video quality can break the sense of true immersion. The tricky part is delivering a great looking image to the device at the right moment. Since the Gear VR is the most widely available set today, let’s look at its technical specs and the challenges of using it to achieve a quality VR video experience.
The challenges of VR video content
While all the headsets have cutting-edge high-resolution displays, the shortfall comes from content delivered at low resolution.
File size. With Gear VR, many of the video-based experiences in applications from VRSE and others require an initial download. The downloads are very large—more than 1 GB in size— and slow to load onto the device. That is the first ding against the experience.
We call it “virtual reality,” but the quality of the video we watch in VR headsets still doesn’t look real. Why is quality important? The feeling of really being there, called “spatial immersion,” is undermined by poor-quality video. Today, a great deal of VR video struggles to achieve immersion, because the poor quality distracts the viewer from the feeling of realism.
A true feeling of immersion comes from a combination of narrative and spatial immersion. Narrative immersion occurs when the viewer becomes emotionally invested in the story. Think about reading a novel or watching your favorite movie. You get so caught up in the story that you lose track of time. Spatial immersion occurs when the viewer becomes convinced by their senses that they are in a new space. When we are experiencing the sights and sounds of a new space and engaged with a compelling story, we can be powerfully moved. When we get these two ingredients right, we feel like we are truly in virtual reality.
There are no hard and fast rules for achieving narrative immersion. But we can define how to make a great-looking video that can fool your senses to create spatial immersion.
Many things that are called VR today fall far short of this goal. Services such as Google’s YouTube 360° and Facebook 360° have started to regularly offer 360-degree video content that simulates VR by displaying spherical video in a standard video player. 360-degree video is usually delivered through a web browser or on a simple device like Google Cardboard. But moving a mouse or holding up a cardboard box to your face requires hand-eye coordination that makes your brain take on tasks that interfere with immersion. Holding a smartphone up to your head is fine for a few minutes, but who wants to do that for a two-hour movie? A better experience comes from a head-mounted display that accurately and naturally tracks your movement.
A mobile phone-based headset like the popular Samsung Gear VR has good motion sensors and fast response times, and is capable of creating an immersive experience. There are many new headsets coming to the market in 2016. The Oculus Rift and HTC Vive are both tethered by cables to a PC, making use of the PC’s GPU capabilities to render 3D data quickly, and using additional sensors to track user motion in more directions than the Gear VR. Both the mobile and PC-tethered headsets have high-resolution displays with plenty of pixels, but when those displays are used to play video, the video quality tends to be poor.
Even with good display hardware in a headset, low video quality can break the sense of true immersion. The tricky part is delivering a great looking image to the device at the right moment. Since the Gear VR is the most widely available set today, let’s look at its technical specs and the challenges of using it to achieve a quality VR video experience.
The challenges of VR video content
While all the headsets have cutting-edge high-resolution displays, the shortfall comes from content delivered at low resolution.
File size. With Gear VR, many of the video-based experiences in applications from VRSE and others require an initial download. The downloads are very large—more than 1 GB in size— and slow to load onto the device. That is the first ding against the experience.
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