Methodology to Assess Quality, Presence, Empathy, Attitude, and Attention in 360-degree Videos for Immersive Communications

Abstract

This paper analyzes the joint assessment of video quality, spatial and social presence, empathy, attitude, and attention in three conditions: (A) visualizing and rating the perceptual quality of contents in a Head-Mounted Display (HMD), (B) visualizing the contents in an HMD, and (C) visualizing the contents in an HMD where participants can see their hands and take notes. The experiment simulates an immersive communication environment where participants attend three conversations of different genres and from different acquisition perspectives, designed and acquired in the context of international experiences. In this paper, video quality is evaluated with Single-Stimulus Discrete Quality Evaluation (SSDQE) methodology. Spatial and social presence are evaluated with questionnaires adapted from the literature. Initial empathy is assessed with Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI) and a questionnaire is designed to evaluate the attitude changes. Attention is evaluated with three questions about the conversations of the contents that had pass/fail answers. Fifty-four participants were evenly distributed among A, B, and C conditions taking into account their international experience backgrounds (working or studying in a foreign country), obtaining a balanced and diverse sample of participants. The results from the subjective test validate the proposed methodology in VR communications, showing that video quality experiments can be adapted to conditions imposed by experiments focused on the evaluation of socioemotional features in terms of contents of long-duration, actor and observer acquisition perspectives, and genre. In addition, the positive results related to the sense of social and spatial presence imply that technology can be relevant in the analyzed use case. Other main results are: the acquisition perspective greatly influences social presence and all the contents have a positive impact on all participants on their attitude towards international experiences (interest, respect, tolerance, and social sensitivity).Finally, the annotated dataset, Student Experiences Around the World dataset (SEAW-dataset), obtained from the experiment is made publicly available for the research community.

Comparison of Conditions for Omnidirectional Video with Spatial Audio in Terms of Subjective Quality and Impacts on Objective Metrics Resolving Power

“…Methodologies for 360°video quality experiments have recently been standardized in ITU-T Rec. P.919 [1], and previous works [2][3][4][5] focusing exclusively on the video component. Spatial audio, e.g., ambisonics, brings a better sense of immersion in content by allowing users to look in a specific direction and hear audio that reflects their head movements and positions.…”

Emerging Telepresence Technologies in Hybrid Learning Environments

“…By having a fully immersive experience, remote learners can increase the sense of presence in the classroom, which has a positive impact in the conveyance of empathy and attention. [9,17,21]. While these technologies have positive afordances, they also present limitations.…”