September 4, 2025 | Duke I3T Lab students characterize the performance of commercial XR headsets in a paper appearing at IEEE ISMAR 2025
How good are modern XR devices at spatial tracking - the capability that is critical to keeping virtual content in place in AR experiences?
In Duke I3T Lab's IEEE ISMAR 2025 paper led by Tianyi Hu with help from Zhehan Qu and Tianyuan (Alex) Du, we evaluate the performance of 5 state-of-the-art XR devices, in a Duke Robotics mocap space with a custom-designed rig -- "3D printed heads" -- allowing for simultaneous evaluation of multiple XR devices.
Apple Vision Pro (AVP) wins - unsurprisingly, given its hardware sophistication and price. All devices we tested meet the perceptual requirements for VR, yet none offer the performance that would make spatial errors unnoticeable in AR.
This paper, appearing at IEEE ISMAR, extends our prior work that appeared at ACM ImmerCom, that only considered Apple Vision Pro and Meta Quest 3.
- Paper pre-print on ArXiv
- GitHub repository, with hardware description and traces we collected