Social VR: A New Medium for Remote Communication and Collaboration

We are facing increasingly pressure on reducing travel and working remotely. Tools that support effective remote communication and collaboration are much needed. Social Virtual Reality (VR) is an emerging medium, which invites multiple users to join a collaborative virtual environment (VE) and has the potential to support remote communication...

CEAP-360VR: A Continuous Physiological and Behavioral Emotion Annotation Dataset for 360 VR Videos

Watching 360 videos using Virtual Reality (VR) head-mounted displays (HMDs) provides interactive and immersive experiences, where videos can evoke different emotions. Existing emotion self-report techniques within VR however are either retrospective or interrupt the immersive experience. To address this, we introduce the Continuous...

A pipeline for multiparty volumetric video conferencing: Transmission of point clouds over low latency DASH

The advent of affordable 3D capture and display hardware is making volumetric videoconferencing feasible. This technology increases the immersion of the participants, breaking the flat restriction of 2D screens, by allowing them to collaborate and interact in shared virtual reality spaces. In this paper we introduce the design and development...

Corrnet: Fine-grained emotion recognition for video watching using wearable physiological sensors

Recognizing user emotions while they watch short-form videos anytime and anywhere is essential for facilitating video content customization and personalization. However, most works either classify a single emotion per video stimuli, or are restricted to static, desktop environments. To address this, we propose a correlation-based emotion...

Annotation Tool for Precise Emotion Ground Truth Label Acquisition while Watching 360° VR Videos

We demonstrate an HMD-based annotation tool for collecting precise emotion ground truth labels while users are watching 360° videos in Virtual Reality (VR). Our tool uses an HTC VIVE Pro Eye HMD for displaying 360° videos, a Joy-Con controller for inputting emotion annotations, and an Empatica E4 wristband for capturing physiological signals....

ET-CycleGAN: Generating thermal images from images in the visible spectrum for facial emotion recognition

Facial thermal imaging has in recent years shown to be an efficient modality for facial emotion recognition. However, the use of deep learning in this field is still not fully exploited given the small number and size of the current datasets. The goal of this work is to improve the performance of the existing deep networks in thermal facial...

A reduced reference metric for visual quality evaluation of point cloud contents

Point cloud representation has seen a surge of popularity in recent years, thanks to its capability to reproduce volumetric scenes in immersive scenarios. New compression solutions for streaming of point cloud contents have been proposed, which require objective quality metrics to reliably assess the level of degradation introduced by coding...

Uncovering seams in distributed play of tabletop role-playing games

We uncover how geographically distributed players of tabletop role-playing games engage narrative, ludic, and social aspects of play. Our existing understandings of tabletop role-playing games are centered around co-located play on physical tabletops. Yet, online play is increasingly popular. We interviewed 14 players, experienced with online...

From the lab to the OB truck: Object-based broadcasting at the FA Cup in Wembley Stadium

While traditional live-broadcasting is typically comprised of a handful of well-defined workflows, these become insufficient when targeting multiple screens and interactive companion devices on the viewer side. In this case study, we describe the development of an end-to-end system enabling immersive and interactive experiences using an...

Experiencing virtual reality together: Social VR use case study

As Virtual Reality (VR) applications gain more momentum recently, the social and communication aspects of VR experiences become more relevant. In this paper, we present some initial results of understanding the type of applications and factors that users would find relevant for Social VR. We conducted a study involving 91 participants, and...

New Signals in Multimedia Systems and Applications

The objective of this special issue is to revisit how sensor technology is transforming the way context and human behavior is understood, enabling personal and enriched media experiences.</p><p><br/>

Improving mobile video quality through predictive channel quality based buffering

Frequent variations in throughput make mobile networks a challenging environment for video streaming. Current video players deal with those variations by matching video quality to network throughput. However, this adaptation strategy results in frequent changes of video resolution and bitrate, which negatively impacts the users' streaming...

Tangible air: An Interactive Installation for Visualising Audience Engagement

This article presents an end-to-end system for capturing physiological sensor data and visualising it on a real-time graphic dashboard and as part of an art installation. More specifically, it describes an event where the level of engagement of the audience was measured by means of Galvanic Skin Response (GSR) sensors and of the presenter...

A model for evaluating sharing policies for network-assisted HTTP adaptive streaming

HTTP adaptive streaming (HAS) has become the dominant technology for streaming video over the Internet. It gained popularity because of its ability to adapt the video quality to the current network conditions and other appealing properties such as usage of off-the-shelf HTTP servers and easy firewall traversal. However, when multiple HAS...