A Comparison of WebVR and Native VR : Impacts on Performance and User Experience

Sammanfattning: The Virtual Reality (VR) market has grown considerably in recent years. It is a technology that requires high performance in order to provide a good sense of presence to users. Taking VR to the web would open up a lot of possibilities but also poses many challenges. This thesis aims to find out whether VR on the web is a real possibility by exploring the current state of performance and usability of VR on the web and comparing it to native VR. The thesis also aims to provide a basis for discussions on the future of VR on the web. Two identical VR applications were built to make the comparison, one built for the web and one built for native Android. Using these applications, a two-part study was conducted with one part focusing on performance and the other on the user experience. The performance evaluation measured and compared performance for the two applications, and the user study used two separate questionnaires to measure the users experienced presence and VR sickness. The performance study shows that the web application is clearly lagging behind the native application in terms of pure performance numbers, as was expected. On the other hand, the user study shows very similar results between the two applications, contradicting what would be expected based on performance. This hints at successful mitigation techniques in both the hardware and software used. The study also suggests some interesting further research, such as investigating the relationships between performance, VR sickness, and presence. Other possible further research would be to investigate the effect of prefetching and adaptive streaming of resources, and how it could impact VR on the web.