APlausE-MR – Audiovisual Plausibility and Experience in Multi-Party Mixed Reality
* Presenting author
Abstract:
APlausE-MR focuses on distributed multi-party mixed reality (MR) scenarios that involve groups of collocated and remote users. It is our hypothesis that realistic audiovisual virtual environments contribute mainly to the place illusion, the sense of being there, but that creating and maintaining the illusion of plausibility, the sensation of what is happening is real, also requires avatar representations that look, behave and sound credible. Furthermore, supporting the users’ natural interaction with the virtual environment and with each other promotes the credibility of the experience through joint perception. These factors mutually reinforce plausibility and can even compensate each other in case of imperfections. To validate this hypothesis our proposed research addresses three main challenges: (1) The development and integration of the audiovisual technologies that enable plausible communication within a group and between groups in virtual worlds, (2) the identification and qualification of factors influencing the plausibility of audiovisual communication and experiences in multi-party IVEs and (3) the development of suitable evaluation methods and technologies for the analysis of user and group behavior in collocated and distributed audiovisual IVEs.