With the recent advances in capture and display technologies, VR and AR applications are on the spot again. These applications involve new kinds of visual signals, such as omnidirectional images and video, and volumetric signals, such as meshes and point clouds. Additionally, they imply a truly interactive and immersive user experience: the end user can navigate the scene, with three or six degrees of freedom (3DoF or 6DoF), depending on the scenario.

Assessing the quality of the signals and the user’s quality of the experience for VR and AR applications opens up many new research challenges concerning human perception and interaction. Therefore, it is no surprise that standardisation and experts groups are looking into the problem of quality assessment of immersive media.

CWI has recently started to actively participate in the activities of the Immersive Media Group (IMG) of the Video Quality Expert Group (VQEG). VQEG provides a forum, via email lists and face-to-face meetings for video quality assessment experts to exchange information and work together on common goals. The general motivation of VQEG is to advance the field of video quality assessment by investigating new and advanced subjective and objective methods for assessing quality. VQEG activities, such as validation tests, are documented in reports and submitted to relevant ITU Study Groups (e.g., ITU-T SG9, ITU-T SG12, ITU-R WP6C), and other SDOs as appropriate. Several VQEG studies have resulted in ITU Recommendations.

IMG is a group of VQEG that is currently looking at the quality assessment of immersive media, involved in virtual and augmented reality applications. CWI is involved in the current activity of the group, which is focusing on the definition of a joint test plan for the design of a subjective test campaign concerning subjective quality assessment of 360-degree content. The group has also established a liaison with the ITU-T Question 13, on Quality of experience (QoE), quality of service (QoS) and performance requirements and assessment methods for multimedia.

The next face-to-face meeting of the VQEG IMG is scheduled for November 12 to 16 and will be hosted by Google in Mountain View, CA, USA. CWI is planning to participate in the meeting and present the current activities concerning quality assessment of point cloud signals and user’s QoE in social VR applications.

Who we are

CWI is the national research institute for mathematics and computer science of the Dutch National Science Foundation (NWO). CWI performs frontier research in mathematics and computer science and transfers new knowledge in these fields to society in general and trade and industry in particular.

Come and follow us in this VR journey with i2Cat, TNO, Motion Spell, CERTH, Artanim, Viaccess Orca, Entropy Studio.

This project has been funded by the European Commission as part of the H2020 program, under the grant agreement 762111.