Offloading heavy virtual reality (VR) computational operations to a network edge computation entity is receiving increasing attention as a tool to wirelessly and energy efficiently provide low-end client devices with high-quality and immersive interactive VR services anytime and anywhere across the globe. In this work, we aim to provide an understanding of various characteristics of VR computation offloading through comprehensive experiments conducted using a prototype testbed for edge-assisted VR processing and streaming. First, we investigate the benefits of VR offloading in terms of computational load and power consumption reduction for a client device compared to standalone operation. Next, we measure VR traffic patterns, including frame size and data and packet rates with various settings, such as different resolution and encoding options. We also measure several performance metrics associated with the quality of experience, namely, frame rate, packet loss rate, and image quality, with various configuration settings. Then, we present latency measurement studies and investigate per-component latency with various settings. Furthermore, we report the rigorous experiments performed to study the impacts of latency and motion patterns on the black borders formed due to image reprojection and the overfilling technique used to eliminate these black borders. 15 INDEX TERMS Virtual reality, edge computing, offloading, VR streaming, latency, overfilling. 814 compared to standalone operation, VR traffic patterns, quality 815 and latency are strongly affected by the encoding configura-816 tion, the extent of black border formation increases with an 817 increasing latency, and that overfilling successfully reduces 818 black borders but at the cost of increasing computational 819 overhead with an increasing latency. 820 The experimental study conducted in this paper has several 821 limitations: (1) only a single VR client at a time is consid-822 ered, (2) a limited set of hardware platforms is considered, 823 (3) wireless connections are not diverse, and (4) positional 824 tracking is not considered. Therefore, reliving the abovemen-825 tioned limitations, i.e., studying the characteristics of edge 826 VR in more diverse experimental environments, including 827 multiple VR clients at the same time, diverse hosts (e.g., 828 commercial edge and cloud services) and client platforms, 829 wireless connections, such as LTE and 5G NR, and positional 830 tracking remains for future work. The optimization of the 831 VR streaming framework and its communication protocols 832 to minimize the total latency is still an important issue to 833 explore. A holistic/joint design approach of VR content cre-834 ation, communication protocols and the radio resource man-835 agement of VR client links will maximize the efficiency of 836 edge VR, and thus, is a subject for future research. Moreover, 837 extending the service platform for augmented and mixed 838 reality will be another important direction for future work.