Pilot 1: Offline Scenario (Police Interrogation)
Scenario and Theme
The VR episode for pilot 1 departs from the murder of a celebrity. Two users are real-time captured and tele-ported to a shared 70’s look police station, where they will play the role of inspectors by attending the interrogation to two suspects.
Unlike traditional watching apart together scenarios, in which users watch exactly the same content, it was decided to place the users in a shared observation space, but in front of a different one-way mirror connecting to two separate interrogation rooms where a different suspect is being interrogated. Therefore, although the two users share a common space and can directly see and talk to each other, they can only see and hear one of the two interrogation scenes belonging to the same story. The story includes a set of triggers to boost interaction between the users, exchanging impressions and findings to reach a conclusion about the authority of the crime.
The VR experience for pilot 1 lasts 8 minutes.
Key Objectives
- Develop and integrate technological components to provide Social VR experiences for two users, captured in real-time and represented in a volumetric format, in an offline scenario
- Design an appropriate evaluation methodology for Social VR
- Create an innovative VR episode to recreate the envisioned Social VR experience
- Gain insights about the benefits / advantages of having realistic users in VR experiences, instead of avatars
- Gain insights about the (combinations of) content formats that provide the best user experience
- Provide satisfactory levels of presence, quality of interaction and togetherness
Demo video
Pilot Execution
- November 2018: Evaluation with end users (n=30 users) at i2CAT lab node (Barcelona)
- March 2019 – May 2019: Focus Groups with 25 VR companies (n=25 professionals), by all partners
- Pilot showcased at: NEM 2017 (🏆 Best Exhibition Award), IBC 2018, ACM MMSYS 2018, VRDays 2019, NEM 2019 (🏆 Best Exhibition Award)
Key Outcomes / Insights
- First major release of the VR-Together platform
- Successful connection between the partners’ labs, shaping the VR-Together User Lab
- A novel evaluation methodology for Social VR, including a questionnaire that combines presence, immersion and togetherness
- Social VR experiences using realistic avatars are preferred to those using avatars, and resemble face-to-face scenarios
- The created Social VR experience provides satisfactory levels of quality of interaction, presence, and togetherness
- Validation of requirements and gathering of extra requirements for Social VR (6 Degrees of Freedom or 6DoF, interaction with the VR environment, HMD removal…)
- Identification of aspects to be improved (fluidity, delays, resolution of users’ reconstruction…)
- Confirmation of the high applicability and potential of Social VR in the commercial landscape
- Guidelines for market adoption
- High impact publications and standardization contributions
