Tag: VR

Group-to-group telepresence systems immerse geographically separated groups in a shared interaction space where remote users are represented as avatars. Notably, such systems allow users to interact with collocated and remote interlocutors simultaneously. In this context, where virtual user representations can be directly compared with real users, we investigate how visual realism (avatar type) and aural realism (presence of spatial audio) affect communication. Furthermore, we examine how communication differs between collocated and remote pairs of interlocutors. In our user study, groups of four participants perform a collaborative conversation task under the aforementioned visual and aural realism conditions. Results indicate that avatar realism has positive effects on subjective ratings of perceived message understanding, togetherness, and naturalness, and yields behavioural differences that indicate more interactivity and engagement. Few significant effects of aural realism were observed. Comparisons between collocated and remote communication found that collocated communication was perceived as more effective, but that more visual attention was paid to both remote participants than the collocated user.

In collocated social virtual reality, the relative physical and virtual positions of users are often synchronised to reduce the risk of collisions between users. In this paper, we introduce a two-phase confirmation-based group navigation concept for collocated scenarios which allows users to stay behind and catch up to the group based on individual confirmation. The confirmation to catch up can be triggered by the group’s guide, the individual user or both. Ghost avatars, which visualise the physical locations of other users, are used to avoid physical collisions in situations where part of the group has already virtually navigated to a new location. We evaluate the three confirmation-based techniques in a user study (N = 24) in the context of a guided tour in a virtual museum and compare it to a baseline group navigation technique. Our findings show that users prefer having the autonomy to decide when to follow their group. Despite increased complexity, the proposed techniques achieved comparable levels of co-presence, spatial orientation, and understanding of others’ positions in both the virtual and physical environments as the baseline, effectively balancing user autonomy, navigation understanding and social experience.

Immersive recordings capture virtual reality interactions and are used in various contexts such as education and entertainment. However, there has been only limited research on requirements and techniques for editing such recordings. We interviewed expert editors of video recordings to understand their workflows, familiarised them with immersive recordings, and asked them about what editing challenges and capabilities they can envision for immersive recordings. The experts identified several functionalities they considered relevant for editing, including viewer placement, control over the viewer’s size, support for live and asynchronous collaboration, and different transition types. 

We present ISA, an Immersive Study Analyzer system designed for the comprehensive analysis of social VR studies. ISA records all user actions, speech, and the contextual environment of social VR studies. A key feature is the ability to review and analyze such immersive recordings collaboratively in VR, through support of behavioral coding and user-defined analysis queries for efficient identification of complex behavior. We make our code open source.

Keeping in social contact with friends and family and engaging in social and enjoyable activities is important for our well-being – especially for older adults, who often live distant from loved ones. We present findings from interviews with older and young adults on their needs and desires for social VR, especially regarding the types of activity they would like to engage in. We compare these findings to identify differences, commonalities, and opportunities for inter-generational social VR activities.

In this work, we conducted a study assessing the effect of spatial audio on audiovisual plausibility and presence perception in a three-user interactive communication scenario. Triads of participants perform a collaborative conversation task under three conditions: a VR condition with binaural spatial audio, a VR condition with simple diotic audio, and a real-world reference condition.

Standing in a large crowd can be uncomfortable and usually results in other users obstructing the view of the virtual environment. In this paper, we present four techniques designed to improve the user’s view in crowded environments. Inspired by related work on various transparency and clipping techniques, as well as observed user behavior in crowded scenarios, our paper addresses the visibility problem by locally manipulating the appearance of other users. Three of our techniques define a region of interest using a handheld f lashlight metaphor. Depending on the technique, occluding users are either pushed to the side, scaled, or made partially transparent. The fourth technique allows users to vertically adjust their position. A user study with 24 participants found that the transparency technique was advantageous for quick search tasks. However, in a realistic museum setting, no clear favorite could be determined because the techniques make different trade-offs and users weighted these aspects differently. In a final ranking, the vertical position adjustment and transparency techniques were the most popular, but the scaling technique and vertical position adjustment were found to be the most natural.

Spatial audio representations have been shown to positively impact user experience in traditional, non-immersive communication media. While spatial audio also contributes to presence in single-user immersive VR, its impact in virtual communication scenarios has not yet been fully understood. This work aims to further investigate which communication scenarios benefit from spatial audio representations. We present a study in which pairs of interlocutors undertake a collaborative task in an audiovisual Virtual Environment (VE) under different auralization and scene arrangement conditions. The novel task is designed to encourage simultaneous conversation and movement, with the aim of increasing the relevance of spatial hearing. Results are obtained through questionnaires measuring social presence and plausibility, as well as through conversational and behavioral analysis. Although participants are shown to favor binaural auralization over diotic audio in a direct active-listening comparison, no significant differences in social presence, plausibility, or communication behavior could be found. Our results suggest that spatial audio may not affect user experience in dyadic communication scenarios where spatial auditory information is not directly relevant to the considered task.