On latency compensation and its effects on head-motion trajectories in virtual environments

We present experiments on latency and its compensation methods in a virtual reality application using a head-motion display (HMD) and a 3D-head tracker. Our purpose is to compare, both in simulation and in a real task, four tracker prediction methods: the grey system theory-based prediction, Kalman filtering, a simple linear extrapolation, and the basic method without prediction. Typical motion trajectories of the four methods in simulation are plotted, and jitter effects are examined. Kalman filtering was found to have the largest jitter among the four. An experiment is also presented to simulate a real-world application: following a tour guide in a walkthrough of a building. An improvement of 120% was observed.