Impact of transmission errors on the adoption of Cloud Gaming

Cloud gaming has emerged as a transformative paradigm in interactive entertainment by offloading computational workloads to remote servers and streaming game content to lightweight client devices. Concurrently, the rise of Virtual Reality (VR) has introduced new dimensions of user immersion and interaction fidelity. Combining these paradigms into VR cloud gaming offers unprecedented scalability and accessibility but also introduces significant technical challenges—chief among them being the impact of network impairments on user experience. This thesis presents a comprehensive investigation into the effects of latency, jitter, packet loss, and bandwidth limitations on Quality of Experience (QoE) in VR cloud gaming environments. Through an extensive review of academic literature and commercial systems, we identify critical thresholds for latency sensitivity and explore how different network conditions disrupt immersion, responsiveness, and perceptual coherence. A central contribution of this work is the taxonomy and evaluation of latency compensation techniques, categorized into feedback-based, prediction-based, time manipulation, and world adjustment strategies. We analyze the efficacy of these approaches using both objective metrics (e.g., motion-to-photon latency, prediction error) and subjective indicators (e.g., user comfort and presence). Moreover, we highlight the growing role of adaptive systems and machine learning in dynamically orchestrating these techniques to respond to fluctuating network conditions. Our findings indicate that no single compensation method is universally effective; rather, an integrated, context-aware approach is necessary to maintain high QoE in VR cloud gaming. The thesis concludes with proposed directions for future research, including user-specific adaptation, cross-platform generalization, and ethical considerations in multiplayer environments.