Understanding Sensor Vulnerabilities in Industrial XR Tracking

Extended Reality (XR) systems deployed in industrial and operational settings rely on Visual--Inertial Odometry (VIO) for continuous six-degree-of-freedom pose tracking, yet these environments often involve sensing conditions that deviate from ideal assumptions. Despite this, most VIO evaluations emphasize nominal sensor behavior, leaving the effects of sustained sensor degradation under operational conditions insufficiently understood. This paper presents a controlled empirical study of VIO behavior under degraded sensing, examining faults affecting visual and inertial modalities across a range of operating regimes. Through systematic fault injection and quantitative evaluation, we observe a pronounced asymmetry in fault impact where degradations affecting visual sensing typically lead to bounded pose errors on the order of centimeters, whereas degradations affecting inertial sensing can induce substantially larger trajectory deviations, in some cases reaching hundreds to thousands of meters. These observations motivate greater emphasis on inertial reliability in the evaluation and design of XR systems for real-life industrial settings.