A Subjective Quality Evaluation of 3D Mesh With Dynamic Level of Detail in Virtual Reality

3D meshes are one of the main components of Virtual Reality applications. However, a huge amount of network and computational resources are required to process 3D meshes in real time. A potential solution to this challenge is to dynamically adapt the Level of Detail (LoD) of a 3D mesh based on the object’s position and the user’s viewpoint. In this paper, we conduct a subjective study to investigate users’ quality perception of 3D meshes with dynamic Levels of Detail in a Virtual Reality environment. The subjective experiment is carried out with five 3D meshes of different characteristics, four Levels of Detail, and four distance settings. The results of the experiment show that the impact of the dynamic level of detail depends on both the position of the 3D object in the virtual world and the number of vertices of the original mesh. In addition, we present a quality model that can accurately predict the MOS score of a LoD version of a 3D mesh from the number of vertices and the distance from the viewpoint.