A Subjective Quality Evaluation of 3D Mesh with Dynamic Level of Detail in Virtual Reality

TL;DR

This paper investigates how dynamic Level of Detail in 3D meshes affects user perception in Virtual Reality, revealing factors influencing quality and proposing a predictive quality model based on mesh vertices and distance.

Contribution

It provides the first subjective evaluation of dynamic LoD in VR and introduces a model to predict perceived quality from mesh complexity and viewer distance.

Findings

User perception varies with object position and mesh complexity.

Dynamic LoD impact depends on distance and original mesh vertices.

Proposed model accurately predicts MOS scores based on mesh vertices and distance.

Abstract

3D meshes are one of the main components of Virtual Reality applications. However, many network and computational resources are required to process 3D meshes in real-time. A potential solution to this challenge is to dynamically adapt the Level of Detail (LoD) of a 3D mesh based on the object's position and the user's viewpoint. In this paper, we conduct a subjective study to investigate users' quality perception of 3D meshes with dynamic Level of Detail in a Virtual Reality environment. The subjective experiment is carried out with five 3D meshes of different characteristics, four Levels of Detail, and four distance settings. The results of the experiment show that the impact of the dynamic level of detail depends on both the position of the 3D object in the virtual world and the number of vertices of the original mesh. In addition, we present a quality model that can accurately predict the MOS score of a LoD version of a 3D mesh from the number of vertices and the distance from the viewpoint.