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 drawbacks provided by a lightweight and low-cost Social VR platform (
SocialVR
), in which users are captured by several cameras and reconstructed in real-time. In particular, the paper contributes with (1) the design and evaluation of an experimental protocol for Social VR experiences; (2) the report of a production workflow for this new type of media experiences; and (3) the results of experiments with both end-users (
N
=
15 pairs
) and professionals (
N
=
22 companies
) to evaluate the potential of the
SocialVR
platform. Results from the questionnaires and semi-structured interviews show that end-users rated positively towards the experiences provided by the
SocialVR
platform, which enabled them to sense emotions and communicate effortlessly. End-users perceived the photo-realistic experience of
SocialVR
similar to face-to-face scenarios and appreciated this new creative medium. From a commercial perspective, professionals confirmed the potential of this communication medium and encourage further research for the adoption of the platform in the commercial landscape.
Supplementary Information
The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10055-022-00651-5.
The authors would like to thank the members of the EU H2020 VR-Together consortium for their valuable contributions, especially Marc Martos and Mohamad Hjeij for their support in developing and evaluating tasks.
This paper introduces the Point Cloud Multipoint Control Unit (PC-MCU): a key component for multiuser holoconferencing systems, where remote participants are represented as Point Clouds. The presented solution redefines the idea of MCU, broadly used to optimize connections and communications between users in traditional videoconferencing, and introduces a set of key features for the optimization of holoconferencing services where multiple users can be remotely connected. The PC-MCU is a virtualized cloud-based component, that aims at reducing the end-user client computational resources and bandwidth usage, providing the following key features: fusion of volumetric videos, Level of Detail (LoD) adjustment and non visible data removal. The results obtained for a scenario with two remote users, show how the introduction of the PC-MCU provides significant benefits in terms of computational resources and bandwidth savings, thus alleviating the requirements at the client side in holoconferencing services when compared to a baseline condition without using it. These improvements open the door to further research on this area to enable scalable and adaptive holoconferencing services using lightweight devices. CCS CONCEPTS • Computer systems organization → Real-time operating systems; Real-time systems; Real-time operating systems; • Networks → Cloud computing; Network services; Cloud computing.
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