Why Augmented Reality Gaming Based Application needs Stress Testing

Introduction

The rise of high-end mobile devices have increased the growth of developing “Augmented reality based gaming applications”.

The content is virtually assimilated in mobile screen displays and it has opened up a new platform to produce interesting Augmented Reality (AR) based games for generation next crowd.

Mobile augmented reality is all about the superimposition of qualitative visual data on the surroundings that have been captured by the user’s device through camera.

Mobile Augmented reality has quickly spread in the gaming industry to increase visibility of important game aspects especially the adventurous games played in virtual world.

Thus emphasizing the importance of game testing services. Drawing room, Soccer field, Racing tracks, etc. can potentially be created thru AR mode.

The augmented reality based applications are growing rapidly in the market. One of the survey says, the value of AR based mobile apps can up to USD 15 Billion in 2022.

Apple has launched ARKit to help developers make augmented reality applications for the iOS platform.

Google has kicked off projects like Daydream and Google Cardboard to provide low cost virtual reality experiences.

As per the industry standards, the demands for Oculus Rift and the HTC Vive (VR Headsets) have grown exponentially in last couple of years

Since AR comes with very high rich image / video content, there will be a potential bottlenecks with respect to overall performance of the AR based gaming apps.

Latency in populating the content is the biggest technical challenge in Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality (VR) based application. 

Typically the AR / VR based systems are bound to have a threshold latency which comes from

• Frame rate of the content being drawn
• Refresh rate of the display
• Input lag from the interaction

Following are the potential user experience based performance issues which end users encounter while accessing the AR based Mobile Apps

• Low quality Video streaming
• Shrinking / Miniature
• Real time rendering
• Graphical Overlays
• Dealing with huge amount of data
• Response time delays
• GPS Sensor accuracy
• Battery life of Devices (AR apps installed in Mobile)
• Multi user experience limitations

In order to benchmark the performance of the AR based application, it’s better to do series of load testing followed by a Stress test.

This kind of tests will help AR based gaming application to capture below mentioned critical metrics (though not confined only to this list) and identify the potential performance related bottlenecks

Business critical Metrics to be captured while doing stress test on AR based gaming application

• Battery Usage (Device)
• Battery Temperature (Device)
• AR / VR headsets (For e.g. the content running on Oculus Rift cannot directly run on HTC Vive without any modifications)
• CPU Usage (Corresponding Server and Device)
• Memory Usage (Corresponding Server and Device)
• Network Usage (Corresponding Server and Device)
• Disk Usage (Corresponding Server and Device)
• Frames Per Second (FPS)