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Questionnaire to measure the quality of mediated social communication

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.

In this demo, we show a system where real-time processing modules for immersive conferencing streams can be dynamically relocated between user device and edge computing nodes, with minimal visual impact on the resulting stream.

Virtual Reality (VR) and 360-degree video are set to become part ofthe future social environment, enriching and enhancing the waywe share experiences and collaborate remotely. While Social VRapplications are getting more momentum, most services regardingSocial VR focus on animated avatars. In this demo, we present ourefforts towards Social VR services based on photo-realistic videorecordings. In this demo paper, we focus on two parts, the communicationbetween multiple people (max 3) and the integrationof new media formats to represent users as 3D point clouds. Weenhance a green screen (chroma key) like cut-out of the personwith depth data, allowing point cloud based rendering in the client. Further, the paper presents a user study with 54 people evaluatinga three-people communication use case and a technical analysisto move towards 3D representations of users. This demo consistsof two shared virtual environments to communicate and interactwith others, i.e. i) a 360-degree virtual space with users being representedas 2D video streams (with the background removed) andii) a 3D space with users being represented as point clouds (basedon color and depth video data).

While most IPTV operators rely on Set-Top Boxes (STBs) to deliver linear interactive TV services to consumers, several operators are moving towards app-based delivery. For Over-The-Top (OTT) service providers that offer video on demand or other non-linear TV services, delivery via TV apps is already an important method. There are some advantages in delivering TV services via an app, also for IPTV operators offering linear TV. For example, via apps operators and consumers are no longer forced to install a separate box per TV set. However, exploiting this opportunity comes with several challenges that we will highlight, such as OS fragmentation, API limitation and rigid streaming client configurations. Further we will present best practices on how to address these challenges, based on measurements in our lab. Particularly, we will highlight where standards such as HbbTV Operator Applications, CTA Wave, DASH-IF IOP guidelines can help and ultimately improve the user experience.

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.