Engagement and Quality of Experience in Remote Business Meetings: A Social VR Study

Currently, most videoconferencing technologies do not keep employees sufficiently engaged during business meetings. Recent studies have shown how extended reality (XR) technologies can help in executing remote meetings in new and possibly better ways. One important factor for meetings in e.g. Virtual Reality (VR) is avatar realism, with the...

Quality of Experience in Telemeetings and Videoconferencing: A Comprehensive Survey

Telemeetings such as audiovisual conferences or virtual meetings play an increasingly important role in our professional and private lives. For that reason, system developers and service providers will strive for an optimal experience for the user, while at the same time optimizing technical and financial resources. This leads to the discipline...

Virtual Visits: Life-size Immersive Communication

Elderly people in care homes face a great lack of contact with their families and loved ones. Social isolation and loneliness are detrimental factors for older people in their health condition, cognitive impairment and quality of life. We previously presented a communication system that facilitated high-quality mediated social contact through an...

VRComm: An end-To-end web system for real-Time photorealistic social VR communication

Let's get in touch!: Adding Haptics to Social VR

Social VR shall allow natural communication between users with high social presence, as if users are in the same room. One way to increase social presence is to add haptic interaction to allow,for example, users to give each other a "high-five" or to pass documents among them. In this paper, we present our web-based VR communication framework...

Multi-user (social) virtual reality commnunication

Virtual Reality (VR) applications are currently suffering several gaps to allow a full breakthrough in the consumer market. One aspect is the social isolation. Many VR experiences do not represent yourself or other users, making it lonely rather than a shared experience. VR applications that do offer a user representation mostly use artificial...

Watching videos together in social virtual reality: An experimental study on user's QoE

In this paper, we describe a user study in which pairs of users watch a video trailer and interact with each other, using two social Virtual Reality (sVR) systems, as well as in a face-to-face condition. The sVR systems are: Facebook Spaces, based on puppet-like customized avatars, and a video-based sVR system using photo-realistic virtual user...

Multi-sensor capture and network processing for virtual reality conferencing

Recent developments in key technologies like 5G, Augmented and Virtual Reality (AR/VR) and Tactile Internet result in new possibilities for communication. Particularly, these key digital technologies can enable remote communication and collaboration in remote experiences. In this demo, we work towards 6-degrees of freedom (DoF) photo-realistic...

Everyday Photo-Realistic Social VR: Communicatie and Collaborate with an Enhanced Co-Presence and Immersion

360-degree photo-realistic VR conferencing

VR experiences are becoming more social, but many social VR systems represent users as artificial avatars. For use cases such as VR conferencing, photo-realistic representations may be preferred. In this paper, we present ongoing research into social VR experiences with photo-realistic representations of participants and present a web-based...

Virtual Reality Conferencing: Multi-user immersive VR experiences on the web

Virtual Reality (VR) and 360-degree video are set to become part of the future social environment, enriching and enhancing the way we share experiences and collaborate remotely. While Social VR applications are getting more momentum, most services regarding Social VR focus on animated avatars. In this demo, we present our efforts towards Social...

TogetherVR: A framework for photorealistic shared media experiences in 360-degree VR

Virtual reality (VR) and 360° video are reshaping the media landscape, creating a fertile business environment. In the past years, many new 360° cameras and VR headsets entered the consumer market. Distribution platforms are being established and new production studios are emerging. VR is a hot topic in research and industry, and many new and...