Towards socialVR

Towards socialVR: Evaluating a novel technology for watching videos together

Montagud, Mario (I2CAT Foundation; Universidad de Valencia (ICMol))
Li, Jie (Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI))
Cernigliaro, Gianluca (I2CAT Foundation)
El Ali, Abdallah (Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI))
Fernández, Sergi (I2CAT Foundation)
Cesar, Pablo (TU Delft Multimedia Computing; Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI))

2022

Social VR enables people to interact over distance with others in real-time. It allows remote people, typically represented as avatars, to communicate and perform activities together in a shared virtual environment, extending the capabilities of traditional social platforms like Facebook and Netflix. This paper explores the benefits and drawbacks provided by a lightweight and low-cost Social VR platform (SocialVR), in which users are captured by several cameras and reconstructed in real-time. In particular, the paper contributes with (1) the design and evaluation of an experimental protocol for Social VR experiences; (2) the report of a production workflow for this new type of media experiences; and (3) the results of experiments with both end-users (N = 15 pairs) and professionals (N = 22 companies) to evaluate the potential of the SocialVR platform. Results from the questionnaires and semi-structured interviews show that end-users rated positively towards the experiences provided by the SocialVR platform, which enabled them to sense emotions and communicate effortlessly. End-users perceived the photo-realistic experience of SocialVR similar to face-to-face scenarios and appreciated this new creative medium. From a commercial perspective, professionals confirmed the potential of this communication medium and encourage further research for the adoption of the platform in the commercial landscape.

Evaluation Protocol
Presence
Social VR
Togetherness
Virtual Reality
Volumetric Media

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:6c508d45-26c5-4f90-a63d-59f50e4c0712

https://doi.org/10.1007/s10055-022-00651-5

2023-07-01

1359-4338

Virtual Reality, 26 (4), 1593-1613

Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository 'You share, we take care!' - Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.

Institutional Repository

journal article

© 2022 Mario Montagud, Jie Li, Gianluca Cernigliaro, Abdallah El Ali, Sergi Fernández, Pablo Cesar