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Traveling for business meetings is not only costly but also has a negative influence on the environment. Many video conferencing platforms have tried to reduce the need to travel, but people still find it relevant to meet face-to-face. Remote meetings via virtual reality (VR) allow users to still have the feeling of being together in the same space. In VR, avatars are used as digital user representations. This study investigated whether photorealistic avatars influence the connection users feel with each other during a VR remote meeting, and whether congruence between environment and avatar realism influences this connection. A 2x2 within-subject experiment was conducted whereby twelve participants had remote meetings in VR with photorealistic and non-photorealistic avatars and environments. Results indicate that when both participants are represented by live video footage of themselves (photorealistic), they feel more connected with each other than when they are represented by a non-photorealistic avatar. Congruence between the avatar and environment did not seem to influence connection. These results may help to improve the value of future remote business meetings.

We recently developed the Holistic Social Presence Questionnaire (HSPQ) to measure the quality of mediated social communication experiences. Initial re-search confirmed the content and face validity of the HSPQ. This study investi-gates the convergent validity and sensitivity of the HSPQ. Participants completed a decision-making task in groups using either Microsoft Teams or Mibo to com-municate with each other. Upon completing the task, participants rated items from the HSPQ and the validated Networked Minds Questionnaire (NMQ). We ex-pected that Mibo would induce a stronger sense of social presence than MS Teams, since it involves self-movement, orientation, group-forming and spatial audio. The HSPQ showed convergent validity with the NMQ: the ratings on both questionnaires were significantly correlated. However, both the NMQ and HSPQ indicated that participants experienced no significant difference in social presence between both conditions. Hence, further research involving a more immersive communication tool that induces a stronger sense of social presence is needed to assess the sensitivity of the HSPQ.

In our digital age, human social communication is increasingly mediated. However, mediated social communication (MSC) systems will only become a viable alternative for in-person social interactions when they reliably and intuitively convey all relevant social and spatial cues needed by communication partners to establish effective communication, collaboration, mutual understanding, and trust. A lot of research has been done on mediated communication in general, and on the effect of social cues in particular. However, this research typically focuses on particular social cues, investigating effects of implementations in particular situations. In addition, the research often focuses on answering psychological or cognitive questions. The translation to design questions such as functional and technical requirements is often left to the developers of the technical systems. This leaves a gap between psychological research results and a translation towards practical guidelines for designers and developers. This paper aims to make a first step towards guidelines for the implementation of social cues for social XR implementations.

STEER aimed to experiment with advanced practices and technological solutions that can improve the user experience of members of the people ecosystem defined by the project as “Social Telemedia”. Such an ecosystem is already showing, and steadily reinforcing, a great potential for influencing the relationships that, exploiting informatics tools and communication networks, communities of people worldwide are growingly establishing around shared interests, attitudes or professional occupations.Besides the achievement of specific research objectives, STEER aimed to pursue a coordinated strategy and actions for the dissemination of results, which involved submissions to relevant journals, conferences and standardization bodies, and (guest) lectures and talks on STEER topics. Opportunities in the market segments where each industrial partner is active should materialize in the proposition of new or enhanced products or services for social media / social TV and consumer / home devices and applications, which the cooperation in the project makes possible.As a final step in this direction, this deliverable, dissemination report and revised exploitations plans, contains an account of the project dissemination activities that include scientific papers, press releases, leaflets and white papers as well as all standardization contributions and potential patents. Furthermore, it present all partners’ revised (final) exploitation plans in the light of the outcome of the executed experiments.STEER partners disseminated actively their results, involving submissions to relevant journal papers, attending and publishing in conferences and standardization bodies, providing lectures on our technologies, and posting regular updates on our communication platforms. By combining computer sciences and communication networks information, STEER proved to be very successful in bringing useful tools to communities of people sharing common interests. These business opportunities have been exploited in many different sectors. In addition to the concrete tools developed under STEER and already commercially available are presented.This document further has taken into account crucial feedback and comments as expressed by the STEER review committee, during and after the first review of the STEER project, in March 2014. Specifically, this document has presented a fully updated STEER website design, and significantly increased presence on social and video platforms. This document further contains a description of STEER products. Also, the document has presented per-partner exploitation plans, covering both within-consortium follow-up as well as opportunities with external stakeholders. Lastly, this document contains an ethical challenges chapter, including detailed information on how these challenges were met during the experiment, thus providing important information to prospective stakeholders.

This deliverable presents the scenarios and requirements of the third year of the project and provides a brief description of the vision and requirements for the Final EXPERIMEDIA Facility in the Sustainability Phase.

STEER develops around the concept of innovative social and network-aware media distribution architecture that:*coordinates the effective sharing of media and networking resources among participating users, ensuring scalability, stability and network friendliness,*exploits features and capabilities of modern home gateways, such as caching and transcoding, to limit the cost of media distribution through resource sharing, dynamically adapting media exchanges to the capacity of the underlying networks, reducing service discontinuities and improving the overall Quality of Experience of the customer, and*makes the best usage of information about media object geographic location, social relationships and media object dynamics (e.g., popularity changes) to offer an efficient and personalized social-aware search and recommendation functionality.This document provides a detailed view of the STEER architecture, through the definition of its functional components, their purpose, mutual interactions and the applications that the project plans to develop with them.The document is organized as follows:*Section 1 delineates the structure of the document and the underlying rationale*Section 2 analyses the objectives that the STEER architectures tries to fulfil, expressed as system-level requirements affecting end users behaviour, user devices, home gateways, involved service providers, and STEER applications*Section 3 shows how STEER provides a way of organizing the wide range of raw information collected across various social media networks into a number of complementary, structured databases (or ‘graphs’) whose manipulation allows to achieve a deeper insight of the mutual relationships among user, events and data aggregates. This in turn sets the foundations for optimizing features such as recommendation, caching and media distribution.*Section 4 introduces a short but holistic view of the STEER architectural components and their main interactions*Section 5 describes the STEER components in more detail, explaining their purpose, their functionalities and the research objectives that motivate their usage, with relationship to the requirements set in Section 2.*Section 6 and Section 7 describe how specific STEER components are exploited to implement the STEER Augmented Live Broadcast and Storytelling applications, respectively, and the way they address the use cases described in Deliverable D2.1. The user interfaces for both applications has been defined in Deliverable D2.3.

STEER envisages a community-centric digitally-based ecosystem which it refers to as “Social Telemedia” as a cross-breeding of social networks and networked media. According to STEER, the Future Social Telemedia Lifecycle will revolve around media services that user communities can both autonomously build and enjoy exploiting smart tools and specific networking facilities. Hence, the project will investigate the possibilities opened by the creation of an ecosystem where these elements are coordinated to enhance the experiences of their members.To lay the foundation for this work, the present deliverable will introduce a real-life use case that describe the experiences of people that find themselves involved as “producers” and “consumers” of a social telemedia ecosystem. The use case concerns geographically distributed communities of people that automatically gather around an “event”, about which the community members share, retrieve, exchange, and integrate networked media objects that they produce to tell stories from each individual’s perspective.Through this use case, we will be able to show how technologies developed in STEER can facilitate the assessment of the nature of the Future Social Telemedia Lifecycle that revolves around communities, reveal new properties and patterns, create new insights, and explore the synergy between Social Informatics and Networked Media delivery, and its impact on user experiences.While the use case reflects STEER’s vision on future community media service, it is not within the project’s objectives to fully implement the whole set of tools that can make the use case happen in all its aspects. While many of the STEER technologies will provide essential functionalities to the use case, there are also topics that will remain out of the scope of the STEER. For such topics, STEER will however provide outlooks, recommendations and links to related EC projects.