Determining Motion-to-Photon Latency of a VIVE

Closed Ph.D. Project No Affiliation

Low latency is a fundamental requirement for Virtual Reality (VR) systems to reduce the potential risks of cybersickness and to increase effectiveness, efficiency and user experience. The main measurement to describe the responsitivity of an application is by measuring the end-to-end latency, the time from the user performing an action until this action’s results are shown on the display. Between an action and the perception of its effects lie multiple softand hardware systems each running at their own pace. Delays introduced anywhere in the system might lead to inconsistencies between action and stimulus presented by the head-mounted display, leading to unpleasant jitter in the VR experience.

Tasks

The goal of this work is to measure motion-to-photon latency in a VIVE environment, ideally at runtime of an experiment:

• Create a measurable, repeatable movement of a VIVE tracker that can be observed by the VIVE’s lighthouses.
  • The idea is to mount a VIVE tracker onto a NEMA-17 stepper motor, controlled by an Arduino micro controller.
  • The rotation of the VIVE tracker should create a visual pattern on the VIVE HMD’s display that makes it easy to distinguish different angles of the controller.
  • The pattern is detected by an array of photodiodes attached to the micro controller.
  • The micro controller should then be able to measure the time elapsed between a certain rotation of the controller (set by the stepper motor), and the resulting visual effects on the display (detected by the photodiodes).

Prerequisites

• Practical programming skills
• Interest in Real-time Interactive Systems (RIS), especially VR
• Experience with micro controller programming and basic electronics is beneficial, but not required

Contact Persons at the University Würzburg