A Study of User Perception of the Quality of Video Content Rendered Inside a 3-D Virtual Environment

This paper reports on the result of a user study to assess the impact of resolution and frame rate of video on the quality of experience of the users, when the video is rendered inside a 3-D virtual space, and consequently viewed from arbitrary perspectives. A mathematical model for video rate is presented that expresses the total rate as the product of separate functions of spatial and temporal resolutions. Results from the user study are combined with the model to predict the rate parameters which will result in perceptually acceptable quality using the 3-D features of the virtual environment. The results show that by exploiting the insensitivity of users to controlled quality degradation, the downstream network load for the client can be significantly reduced with little or no perceptual impact on the clients.