Recent advances in technology and the opportunity to obtain commodity-level components have made the development and use of three-dimensional virtual environments more available than ever before. How well such components work to generate realistic virtual environments, particularly environments suitable for perception and action studies, is an open question. In this paper we compare two virtual reality systems in a variety of tasks: distance estimation, virtual object interaction, a complex search task, and a simple viewing experiment. The virtual reality systems center around two different head-mounted displays, a low-cost Oculus Rift and a high-cost Nvis SX60, which differ in resolution, field-of-view, and inertial properties, among other factors. We measure outcomes of the individual tasks as well as assessing simulator sickness and presence. We find that the low-cost system consistently outperforms the high-cost system, but there is some qualitative evidence that some people are more subject to simulator sickness in the lowcost system.

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