Towards Quality-of-Experience Models for Watching 360° Videos in Head-Mounted Virtual Reality

Although watching 360° videos with Head-Mounted Displays (HMDs) is getting increasingly more popular, our understanding of its Quality-of-Experience (QoE) is rather limited. This paper develops models to predict the QoE levels of watching 360° videos with HMDs. We implement a 360° video player for diverse projection schemes and conduct user studies to explore the implications of different factors affecting the QoE levels of 360° videos. Multiple QoE models are constructed based on these factors. Evaluation results on the performance of our QoE models are quite positive. Furthermore, we offer our recommendation on model selections under different circumstances. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is among the few attempts to build QoE models for watching 360° videos with HMDs.