If you looked at our Work Plan you could see that the first few stages of the QoE4VR project include acquiring the necessary equipment for establishing the test environment. Apart from resting and accumulating energy for the tasks that are laid out for us in the future, over this summer we were involved with analyzing the available hardware resources (Stage 1.1) and creating the ‘lifelike settings’ in our laboratory where the tests will take place (Stage 1.2) – see the Work Plan for more details.
As planned, the most of the 38,000 HKN provided by the grant (around 5000 €) was spent on: (a) a computer that will be used for running VR applications and (b) VR headset. After analyzing the available hardware and knowing the special requirements of the VR graphics, we have acquired a computer with the following specifications:
Motherboard: ASRock X99 Extreme4
CPU: Intel Core i7 6800K
RAM: 16GB, DDR4 2800 Corsair Vengeance LPX
HDD: SSD Samsung 250GB (960 EVO) and SSD Samsung 1TB (850 EVO)
VGA: EVGA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti FTW3 GAMING
Case: Fractal Design Define S
Power supply: Be quiet! 850W Dark Power PRO
Monitor: Dell 23.8″, P2415Q.
For the VR headset, we decided to go with HTC Vive. Although it is a bit more expensive at the start, compared with some other products like Oculus Rift, the HTC Vive comes with two excellent VR controllers right from the box, it has a SteamVR support and we also got HTC Vive content bundle (containing three VR applications free of charge and one month subscription to the Vive online store). We also like two possible VR settings that HTC Vive supports: Room Scale playing area or Standing playing area.
This equipment now allows us to get our hands dirty while doing some hard work – playing in the VR environment and preparing everything for the subjective tests.