Perceived Quality of Virtual Reality over Millimeter

Wave Wireless Networks

Abstract—Combined with its increasing use over the years

in both consumer and business contexts, there has been a
significant surge in research and development towards wireless
Virtual Reality (VR) solutions. By replacing the tethered con-
nection between the desktop and the Head-Mounted Display
(HMD) with a high throughput wireless connection, the user
can experience a higher degree of movement freedom, which
in turn increases the immersion. Millimeter Wave (mmWave)
networks have the potential to provide the required bandwidth
and latency needed by interactive wireless VR applications.
However, mmWave wireless VR data transmission is prone to
link degradation due to obstacles and mobility, and state-of-
the-art solutions require compression due to limited throughput
capabilities. These impairments could affect the user’s perceived
quality in unexpected manners. In this paper, we perform an
experimental evaluation of the effects of mmWave networks on
the perceived quality of VR. Therefore, we employed the HTC
Vive VR HMD, which can be used wirelessly with the TPCAST
mmWave wireless adapter, to assess the perceived quality of
streamed VR video. As a baseline, we used the wired version of
the same HMD. We found that the main reductions in perceived
quality are caused by the significant compression used in the
wireless solution, rather than by link degradation and attenuation
due to obstacles or mobility.
Index Terms—Virtual Reality, wireless VR, video quality,
objective quality assessment
I. I NTRODUCTION
Over the past decade, Virtual Reality (VR) has seen a sig-
nificant rise in popularity and is already used for a number of
different applications and use cases [1], [2]. As the technology
evolved, it became clear that VR Head-Mounted Displays
(HMDs) requiring a tethered connection to a desktop PC limit
the immersiveness of the VR experience [3]. As a result, fully
standalone VR solutions with on-board processing, such as
the Meta Quest 21 , have been developed in recent years to
provide a cableless VR experience. However, standalone VR
is constrained by the limited computational power available
on the HMD. Therefore, HMDs with a wireless connection to
a separate computing device seem promising. More specifi-
cally, Millimeter Wave (mmWave) frequencies can be used in
room-scale VR to enable a low latency, high throughput and
untethered connection to the HMD [4]. Additionally, unlike
standalone VR solutions, there are no limitations in terms of
computing power.
The HTC Vive2 is a commercially available VR HMD
that, with the addition of the TPCAST Wireless Adapter3 ,
1 https://www.meta.com/quest/products/quest-2/
2 https://www.vive.com/eu/product/vive/
3 https://www.tpcast.cn/h en/htcvive.html
Fig. 1. The hardware components of the wireless testbed and the data flow
between them. The orange and green arrows represent the flow of input
data and audiovisual data, respectively. The blue components represent the
TPCAST hardware added to make the setup wireless. In the wired version of
the testbed, these blue components are replaced by an HDMI and USB cable
provided with the VR headset.
can be turned into a mmWave HMD. However, the effects
of these wireless VR solutions on perceived quality are not
well explored. In [3], an experimental study was conducted
with the HTC Vive to examine the differences between wired
and wireless VR in terms of presence, cybersickness and game
experience. The study reported significant differences in favor
of the wireless setup in terms of game experience. In [5],
an objective quality assessment approach is proposed. Using
the HTC Vive and TPCAST wireless adapter, a testbed was
developed to capture the wireless HDMI and USB signals
to observe video and input traffic, respectively. The study
revealed delivery issues in both input and video traffic when
exposed to object blockage.
In this work, we build upon the testbed presented in [5] and
add two improvements: (i) we explicitly benchmark wireless
VR with the wired version of the HMD; (ii) we provide a
measure of the perceived quality of the system. Therefore,
we recorded the received video segments to objectively score
the perceived quality using full-reference video metrics (i.e.,
VMAF [6]).
II. W IRELESS VR T ESTBED I NFRASTRUCTURE
Fig. 1 shows the structure of the wireless VR testbed. It
has two components: the VR setup (Section II-A) and the
capture setup (Section II-B), which allow to stream a video
to the HTC Vive HMD, while simultaneously capturing the

Fig. 2. VR setup.
video by means of a capture card. In the wired version of the
testbed, that serves as a baseline, the blue components shown
in Fig. 1 are replaced by an HDMI and USB cable provided
with the VR headset.
A. VR Setup
The VR setup consists of a VR-enabled laptop, which
renders the VR applications, and the HTC Vive HMD, which
displays the content rendered by the laptop. The HTC Vive
has a resolution of 2160×1200 (1080×1200 per eye) and a
refresh rate of 89.53 Hz. The used laptop has an Intel Core i7-
10750H CPU, a Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 GPU and 16 GB
of RAM.
In the wireless testbed, the cable between the laptop and
HMD is replaced by three wireless TPCAST components: the
transmitter, the HMD adapter and the router. The transmitter
streams video data to the HMD adapter over a 60 GHz
mmWave link using WirelessHD and a proprietary TPCAST
compression algorithm [7]. The TPCAST adapter not only
receives the video data sent by the transmitter, but also
sends input data (e.g., controllers and HMD positions) to the
TPCAST router over a 5 GHz Wi-Fi link. The router receives
the input data and forwards it to the VR laptop over Ethernet.
Finally, an HDMI splitter is used to split the video signal in
two, so that one can be used for recording.
B. Capture Setup
The capture setup in each testbed consists of a capture PC
with an Intel Core i7-4790K processor, 16 GB of memory
and did not have a GPU. Furthermore, a Magewell Pro
Capture HDMI 4K Plus4 capture card was added to record
the incoming video frames. The Magewell Capture Express5
software was installed on the capture PC, which allowed us to
record the split HDMI video signal in native resolution, both
in the wired and wireless VR configuration.
In the wired testbed, the HDMI cable coming from the VR
laptop is used as input to the splitter. In the wireless testbed,
the video signal received by the TPCAST adapter serves as
input to the splitter, allowing us to record the received video
signal as it is displayed on the HMD after transmission over
the mmWave link.
4 https://www.magewell.com/products/pro-capture-hdmi-4k-plus
5 https://www.magewell.com/capture-express-v3
TABLE I
O UTPUT FORMAT SETTINGS FOR THE C APTURE E XPRESS SOFTWARE
Setting Value
Resolution 2160×1200
Frame rate 89.53 Hz
Video bitrate 32 768 kbps
Audio bitrate 128 kbps
Aspect ratio 9:5
Codec type H.264
GOP size 1s
Bitrate control mode CBR
Profile High
III. E XPERIMENTS
This section describes the experiments performed to assess
the perceived quality of VR over wireless VR. During the
experiments, the HMD beacons were placed approximately
2 m away from each other, while the HMD was placed 1.5 m
in front of the beacons. The TPCAST transmitter was placed
at 1.5 m of the receiver on the headset (Fig. 2).
The steps described below were performed under three
different VR scenarios: Wired, Wireless and Wireless with
Blockage. For the last scenario, we generated blockage on the
mmWave link by placing a tin cookie box over the transmitter,
in order to simulate environmental obstacles that might cause
attenuation. The tin box reliably caused quality degradation
and artifacts in the HMD, visible with the naked eye.
A. Video Segments Generation
We used the OpenVR Benchmark tool [8] to generate
video segments. This benchmark renders a minute-long, fully
reproducible video in the HMD, independent of the controller
and HMD positions. This allowed us to make a recording in
each of the different scenarios and then compare them. The
benchmark renders a fly-through through a voxel world (see
Fig. 3), at the HMD’s native resolution of 2160×1200.
B. Recording
Using the Magewell Capture Express software, we were
able to record the minute-long video sequences generated by
the benchmark as they would appear in the HMD. The settings
used in the capture software can be found in Table I. We
recorded one video in each scenario (i.e., three recordings in
total), as well as a Reference video. This is simply a second
recording in the Wired scenario and serves as the reference in
the video metric.
C. Video Pre-processing for the Evaluation
Before using the recordings in the full-reference video met-
ric, we performed three transformations on all video segments,
namely trimming, cropping and frame rate stabilization.
First, as the recordings were started and stopped manually,
they turned out to be of slightly different length. As such, the
first step before the objective evaluation was to trim them to
60 s from the first benchmark frame, in order to compare them
to the benchmark recording.
Fig. 3. OpenVR benchmark in the Wireless scenario, showing a green artifact
along the right-hand side. This artifact was not visible inside the HMD.
Next, the wireless scenarios produced recordings with a
green artifact on the far right side of the screen (see Fig. 3),
which we suspect to be caused by the proprietary TPCAST
compression algorithm. Since the artifact consistently reoc-
curred in all wireless recordings and was not visible on the
HMD itself, we cropped the artifact out of the recording so
it would not impact the final results. More specifically, we
removed 60 pixels from the left and right hand side of all
videos, resulting in a video resolution of 2040×1200.
Finally, the resource-intensive nature of the OpenVR bench-
mark caused the rendered content to be only 30 Hz, instead
of the stable 89.53 Hz supported by the HMD. Since full-
reference video metrics compare videos frame by frame, we
re-encoded all videos to a stable frame rate of 20 Hz.
It is important to note that the frame rate stabilization is
quite a destructive transformation. The original recordings
had slightly different frame rates due to the nature of the
benchmark, meaning that different frames were removed in
order to reduce the overall rate to 20 Hz. This had a significant
impact on the output score of our video metric, and as a result,
we cannot interpret these results as absolute values. However,
since we applied the same transformations to all videos, we
can compare the results with each other.
D. Perception Quality Metric
To assess the perceived quality of the recordings, we
used the Video Multimethod Assessment Fusion (VMAF) [9]
metric. VMAF predicts the perceptual quality of a video by
using multiple elementary metrics, human vision modeling and
machine learning [6]. This metric produces a linear output
score between 0 and 100, where a higher score is better.
VMAF was originally designed to score 2D content and
comes with three pre-trained models: “1080p”, “mobile
phone” and “4K”. However, according to [10], the 4K VMAF
model can also be used for high-resolution omnidirectional
videos. Moreover, it has been shown to correlate very well
with the human visual system for VR environments [11]. Thus,
we used the 4K VMAF model to score each of the scenarios,
with the wired Reference video serving as the reference.
Fig. 4. VMAF scores and statistics of each scenario. The Wired scenario has
a larger interquartile range compared to the other scenarios, while the Wireless
and Wireless with Blockage scenarios have significantly more outliers.
IV. R ESULTS
Fig. 4 presents the VMAF scores for each of the scenarios
over time, as well as, the statistical characteristics of the
VMAF score in each scenario. We noticed that the scores for
the Wired recording are very noisy. This could be caused by:
(i) the frame rate transformation; and (ii) the fact that Wired
and Reference are two separate videos recorded in the same
wired environment.
The low median value of the Wired scenario, representing
a comparison between two distinct recordings in the wired
environment, shows the effects of the video transformations.
Moreover, the large difference in the median value between
Wired and Wireless indicates that the proprietary compression
has a greater impact on the VMAF score than the artificial
blockage.
The discrepancy between the Wired and Wireless scores
emphasizes the need to develop high-quality compression
algorithms, as well as wireless technologies that can stream
high-quality 3D video content without applying significant
compression (e.g., IEEE 802.11ay). The further reduction in
quality between Wireless and Wireless with Blockage can be
alleviated by avoiding blockages through predictive spatially
aware beamforming and handovers between access points [12].
V. C ONCLUSION & F UTURE W ORK
In this paper, we have performed an objective comparison
between the wired and mmWave version of the HTC Vive
in terms of perceived video quality. The results showed that
the wireless compression caused a significantly larger drop in
perceived quality than the artificially generated blockage.
In future work, we will first perform a subjective evalu-
ation of the content to complement the perception analysis.
Moreover, the study will be extended to determine the effects
of other environmental factors, such as wireless interference
or user mobility. Finally, the use of a less resource-intensive
benchmark and a higher performing rendering machine would
eliminate the need for the video transformations.
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