A Comparative Analysis of Virtual Reality Head-Mounted Display Systems

TL;DR

This paper systematically compares ten VR head-mounted displays using new metrics relevant to education and training, highlighting the HTC Vive Pro's superior comfort and display quality based on multi-user evaluations.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive set of evaluation metrics specifically tailored for VR education and training applications and provides a comparative analysis of popular HMDs.

Findings

HTC Vive Pro has the best comfort and display quality.

Multi-user study shows differences in readability and comfort among HMDs.

New metrics improve VR device assessment for educational use.

Abstract

With recent advances of Virtual Reality (VR) technology, the deployment of such will dramatically increase in non-entertainment environments, such as professional education and training, manufacturing, service, or low frequency/high risk scenarios. Clinical education is an area that especially stands to benefit from VR technology due to the complexity, high cost, and difficult logistics. The effectiveness of the deployment of VR systems, is subject to factors that may not be necessarily considered for devices targeting the entertainment market. In this work, we systematically compare a wide range of VR Head-Mounted Displays (HMDs) technologies and designs by defining a new set of metrics that are 1) relevant to most generic VR solutions and 2) are of paramount importance for VR-based education and training. We evaluated ten HMDs based on various criteria, including neck strain, heat development, and color accuracy. Other metrics such as text readability, comfort, and contrast perception were evaluated in a multi-user study on three selected HMDs, namely Oculus Rift S, HTC Vive Pro and Samsung Odyssey+. Results indicate that the HTC Vive Pro performs best with regards to comfort, display quality and compatibility with glasses.