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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 identified 4 key use cases for Social VR: video conferencing, education, gaming and watching movies. Further, we identified 2 important factors for such experiences: interacting within the experience, and enjoying the experience. Our results serve as an initial step before performing more detailed studies on the functional requirements for specific Social VR applications. We also discuss the necessary research to fill in current technological gaps in order to move Social VR experiences forward.

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A fully dynamic web application in PHP has been developed towards the management of loan material for the Multimedia Production subject. The responsible of managing the web application can create categories, in which they will have the opportunity of creating forms dynamically and then register their products. By the way, students may reserve the products previously registered and take a major control over the products already booked. Due to comfort and usability requirements which arise nowadays, the application may be used from any internet connected device, with the only requirement of having a web browser.

Virtual Reality (VR) and 360-degree video are reshaping the media landscape, creating a fertile business environment. In 2016 many new 360-degree 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 exciting interactive VR content and experiences are emerging. The biggest gap we see in these experiences is the lack of social and shared aspects of VR usage, as today's VR applications tend to be an isolated endeavour. In this paper, we present TogetherVR, a web-based framework for the creation and evaluation of social and shared VR experiences in which users can communicate with a high degree of presence and in photo-realistic video quality. We further elaborate on three multiuser VR cases: watching TV together in VR, social collaboration in VR, and social VR conferencing in a mixed reality setting.

We consider the problem of reliable distribution of audio over packetswitched networks. We make use of multiple-description coding combined with transform coding in order to obtain robustness towards packet losses. Previous approaches to this problem were restricted to the case of only two descriptions. In this work we use nchannel multiple-description lattice vector quantizers (MD-LVQs), which allow for the possibility of using more than two descriptions. For a given packet-loss probability we find the number of descriptions and the bit allocation between transform coefficients which minimizes a perceptual distortion measure subject to an entropy constraint. The optimal quantizers are presented in closed form, thus avoiding any iterative quantizer design procedures. The theoretical results are verified with numerical computer simulations using audio signals and it is shown that in environments with excessive packet losses it is advantageous to use more than two descriptions. We verify in subjective listening tests that using more than two descriptions lead to signals of perceptually higher quality.

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