Social Virtual Reality (VR) applications represent a big step forward in the field of remote communication. Social VR provides the possibility for participants to explore and interact with virtual environments and objects, feelings of a full sense of immersion, and being together. Understanding how user behaviour is influenced by the shared virtual space and its elements becomes the key to design and optimize novel immersive experiences. This paper presents a behavioural analysis of user navigating in 6 degrees of freedom social VR movie. Specifically, we analyse 48 user trajectories from a photorealistic telepresence experiment, in which subjects watch a crime movie together in VR. We investigate how users are affected by salient agents (i.e., virtual characters) and by narrative elements of the VR movie (i.e., dialogues versus interactive part). We complete our assessment by conducting a statistical analysis of the collected data. Results indicate that user behaviour is affected by different narrative and interactive elements. We conclude by presenting our observations and drawing conclusions on future paths for social VR experiences.

This work has been supported by Royal Society under grant IES R1180128 and by Cisco under Cisco Research Center Donation scheme.

Multi-view has the potential to offer immersive viewing experiences to users, as an alternative to 360° and Virtual Reality (VR) applications. In multi-view, a limited number of camera views are sent to the client and missing views are synthesised locally. Given the substantial complexity associated to view synthesis, considerable attention has been given to optimise the trade-off between bandwidth gains and computing resources, targeting smooth navigation and viewing quality. A still relatively unexplored field is the optimisation of the way navigation interactivity is achieved, i.e. how the user indicates to the system the selection of new viewpoints. In this article, we introduce SmoothMV, a multi-view system that uses a non-intrusive head tracking approach to enhance navigation and Quality of Experience (QoE) of the viewer. It relies on a novel Hot&Cold matrix concept to translate head positioning data into viewing angle selections. Streaming of selected views is done using MPEG-DASH, where a proposed extension to the standard descriptors enables to achieve consistent and flexible view identification.

Since the resurgence of consumer-grade virtual reality (VR), VR has successfully established itself on the consumer market. As with any emerging technology, differences can exist between how industry / academia view the technology and how consumers perceive it. We present results from a survey (N=210) conducted into consumer perception and attitudes towards VR. We report sentiment towards VR is positive. We show the associations linked with VR by our respondents match the defining characteristics of VR identified by experts in the literature (a fully virtual view, immersion, and head-worn technology). We identify 3 additional concepts associated with VR by our respondents: video games, futurism, and price. However, our results also show consumer expectations for VR are fixated around "VR for gaming" and suggest VR has to an extent been pigeonholed as primarily being a gaming device.

We present a low-cost telepresence system with application in remote education. It follows an Augmented Distributed Reality approach, where the remote student, wearing a Head Mounted Display, is immersed in a mixed reality scene composed of a real-time 360 video stream of the classroom, a pass-through view of his/her own hands, and additional augmented information obtained via Artificial Intelligence. The system can help students in quarantine or similar situations to improve their learning experience, particularly for hands-on sessions with high interaction between physically present students and their teacher.

With their proliferation, virtual agents become increasingly involved in critical transactions between groups and individuals. Mediated-reality technologies such as virtual and augmented reality present both new opportunities and challenges for representing such agents. This study explores which agent representation users prefer for critical transactions such as a substantial financial investment. We compare our experimental results from a more general group of users with those from a control group of savvy users familiar with virtual environments and computer games, deriving initial design recommendations and an outlook on further research. Generally, a human or humanoid representation is deemed preferable, while, among the alternatives, object representations are favored over zoomorphic, plant-based, or purely symbolic options.

The integration (interoperability) of highly disparate systems is an open topic of research in many domains. A common approach for getting two highly disparate systems to be interoperable, is through an agreed-upon protocol (e.g., via standardization) or by employing a common framework. The problem of integrating systems arises when many of these protocols/frameworks come into existence. Both, agreeing on protocols/frameworks and creating mappings between protocols takes time and effort. An interoperability solution must be scalable and should not require stakeholders to adapt to major changes in their system i.e., systems should not need to be re-engineered as other systems are added, removed or replaced in the integration.

IPSME is introduced as a solution for integrating highly disparate systems. IPSME decouples the dependencies between interacting participants. Interoperability is achieved through dynamic translations, with integrations external to the systems being integrated, avoiding the need for agreed-upon protocols or frameworks. Scalability is achieved by not having a limitation on the number of messaging environments or the topological organization thereof. IPSME is minimally invasive and through a network effect reduces the overall complexity of integrating many systems to linear. IPSME has been evaluated and thus far been tested in three use cases.