QoEvaVE - QoE Evaluation of Interactive Virtual Environments with Audiovisual Scenes
* Presenting author
Abstract:
Interactive virtual environments (IVEs) aim to replace real-world sensory input with corresponding streams of artificial stimulation. If successful, the technology becomes transparent and allows the user to interact naturally in a virtual world. Hence, how close experiences in IVEs replicate that of real life represents a key criterion for IVE quality. IVEs bring new challenges to quality evaluation and render current evaluation approaches in the audio and video communities partially inapplicable. Traditionally, the quality judgment is a dedicated cognitive process, and the participant is constantly aware of the quality judgment task. In contrast, IVEs rely on presence through immersion. Introducing a quality judgment task may reduce immersion in the IVE experience, which in turn affects the quality. Further, IVEs are multimodal and allow 3- or 6-degrees-of-freedom movement in the virtual scene. The project builds upon the foundation of quality of experience (QoE) research and integrates indirect evaluation methodologies from the virtual reality community to develop the first QoE framework for audiovisual IVEs. This paper lays out the planned research and initial audiovisual scenario realization, to foster discussions with interested peers.