PC VR vs Standalone VR Fully-Immersive Applications: History, Technical Aspects and Performance

It is well known that Virtual Reality technology has the potential to immerse the user in virtual real-life scenarios with solid interaction capabilities. However, most of the mission-oriented application scenarios require complex interaction capabilities and feature-rich virtual environments which certainly require processing power. It is a fact that a modern higher-performance PCs can render the 2D and 3D assets in the VR space with higher quality allowing large polygon numbers, greater shadows, post-processing, and other advantages in comparison with the standalone VR headset. From the other side, the PCVR is significantly affecting the mobility, price and development complexity. In this paper, we are focusing on the analyses of the technical aspects of PC VR and Standalone Fully-Immersive VR applications, their characteristics and performance evaluation of real VR application realized as PC VR and Standalone VR. As a conclusion, we prove that acceptable performance and user experience can be achieved with proper and simple optimization for Standalone VR without significantly affecting the VR application usability and tracking accuracy.