Towards Understanding the Energy Consumption of Virtual Reality Applications in Gaming, Education, and Entertainment

Context. Virtual reality (VR) is on the rise in popularity, yet its notable energy consumption demands attention. With the expanding adoption of VR, it becomes crucial to comprehend the energy consumption trends among various VR applications and explore strategies for minimizing their energy usage.Goal. We aim to empirically assess the energy consumption in widely-used VR applications. Our focus is on (i) identifying the influence of energy-intensive components within VR towards the overall energy consumption of VR applications and (ii) comparing the differences in these factors across popular VR applications.Method. We use a Meta Quest 2 headset to assess energy-intensive components in 9 VR applications across 3 different domains. Adopting a 'multiple factors - single treatment' (MF-ST) design, we collect energy measures and statistically analyze them.Results. The study provides evidence that display, storage, memory, CPU, and GPU utilization correlate weakly with the energy consumption of VR applications. It also emerged that the energy consumption of VR applications may be influenced by factors related to usage scenarios, but less so by the specific applications used. The energy consumption of VR games is significantly lower than that of Entertainment and Education VR applications.Conclusions. This is a first step towards creating awareness and providing evidence-based results to VR developers for designing and developing greener VR applications.