A Platform for Collecting User Behaviour Data during Social VR Experiments Using Mozilla Hubs

In recent years, a large variety of online communication tools have emerged, including social Virtual Reality (VR) platforms for interacting in a virtual world with participants being represented as virtual avatars. Given their popularity, an active area of research focuses on improving the user experience in these virtual experiences. To...

Application-level performance of cross-layer scheduling for social VR in 5G

Social VR aims at enabling people located at different places to communicate and interact with each other in a natural way. It poses extremely strong throughput and latency requirements on the underlying communication networks. This paper investigates the potential of using cross-layer design approaches for radio access scheduling in order to...

Designing a VR Lobby for Remote Opera Social Experiences

Several social VR platforms support virtual entertainment events, however their value for post-show activities remains unclear. Through a user-centered approach, we design a social VR lobby experience to enrich four motivations of theatre-goers: social, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual engagement. We ran a context-mapping focus group...

Towards socialVR: Evaluating a novel technology for watching videos together

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...

Understanding and Designing Avatar Biosignal Visualizations for Social Virtual Reality Entertainment

Visualizing biosignals can be important for social Virtual Reality (VR), where avatar non-verbal cues are missing. While several biosignal representations exist, designing effective visualizations and understanding user perceptions within social VR entertainment remains unclear. We adopt a mixed-methods approach to design biosignals for...

Designing and Evaluating Avatar Biosignal Visualization Techniques in Social Virtual Reality

Social VR is the application of virtual reality that supports remote social interaction in virtual spaces. Users communicate and interact with others in the social VR environment through avatars, which are virtual anthropomorphic characters that aim to represent humans in virtual worlds. In addition, the development of the HMD and commercially...

Influence of Narrative Elements on User Behaviour in Photorealistic Social VR

Social Virtual Reality (VR) applications represent a big step forward in the field of remote communication. Social VR provides the possibility for participants to explore and interact with virtual environments and objects, feelings of a full sense of immersion, and being together. Understanding how user behaviour is influenced by the shared...

Generative RGB-D Face Completion for Head-Mounted Display Removal

Virtual reality (VR) creates an exceptional experience in which users can explore virtual environments. Wearing a head-mounted display (HMD), users are able to observe a virtual world that is rendered based on their physical movement and actions. A common solution for capturing the visual and geometric information needed for the construction of...

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...

Designing and evaluating a social VR clinic for knee replacement surgery

Knee osteoarthritis, the most common form of arthritis, which results in stiffness, pain, and impaired movement, is a major cause of disability in elderly populations around the globe. In the course of treating this disease, patients have to endure enormous pains travel to hospitals to meet medical professionals. The motivation behind this...

User experience in social virtual reality: Exploring methodologies for evaluating user experience in social virtual reality

Nowadays, social interaction is often mediated by technology, which makes it possible for people to interact with each other when they are separated. However, most of these technologies target the interaction between 'weak ties' and they cannot support the naturalness and richness offered through face-to-face interaction. Recently, a new type of...

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...