Social VR: A New Medium for Remote Communication and Collaboration

Abstract

We are facing increasingly pressure on reducing travel and working remotely. Tools that support efective remote communication and collaboration are much needed. Social Virtual Reality (VR) is an emerging medium, which invites multiple users to join a collaborative virtual environment (VE) and has the potential to support remote communication in a natural and immersive way. We successfully organized a CHI 2020 Social VR workshop virtually on Mozilla Hubs, which invited researchers and practitioners to have a fruitful discussion over user representations and ethics, evaluation methods, and interaction techniques for social VR as an emerging Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for proft or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the frst page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the owner/author(s).

Toward Hyper-Realistic and Interactive Social VR Experiences in Live TV Scenarios

“…[7], [8]). On the other hand, social interaction between remote users can now be enabled through shared immersive virtual environments, bringing up a new communication medium termed as Social VR [9]. Social VR rapidly attracted a high interest, magnified with the social distancing measures in the last months.…”

Virtual Reality Adaptation Using Electrodermal Activity to Support the User Experience

“…Social VR is an emerging research topic [29,37,38] with many facets and applications. Generally, all instances of Social VR support social interactions between multiple users [39] for an initial application taxonomy.…”

“…Both tasks were simulated as real-world activities in a virtual environment. While the primary task simulates a high workload task, the secondary task simulates situations where the user is distracted by, for instance, other players [38], notifications [79], or graphical artifacts [80].…”

Methodology to Assess Quality, Presence, Empathy, Attitude, and Attention in 360-degree Videos for Immersive Communications

“…Three stereoscopic SRCs in 4K resolution at 30 fps and a duration of approximately five minutes each were acquired and prepared specifically for the experiment. Figure 2 shows a screenshot of the video sources and the original ones can be found in the supplementary material 2 . As it can be observed in all sequences, student volunteers were sitting around a table far enough from the camera to avoid stitching problems affecting the user's QoE and video quality scores.…”

“…Virtual Reality (VR) is an emerging field that is achieving great interest in applications for social purposes, such as assistive, entertainment or educational applications, and also in teleconferencing scenarios [1], [2]. The main reason is that VR provides additional value as a communication platform that goes one step beyond traditional audio and video transmission [3].…”