VRTogether returns to VRDays, the main European event on immersive content, to showcase how technology can enrich our lives and enhance our human well-being. Travelling to another country, visiting the hospital, providing a safer work environment or enjoying an exhibition are some of the experiences enabled by VRTogether innovative Social VR system, which allows users to share their experience with others in a photorealistic way and with a significant improvement of the feeling of being there together. From 4th to 6th of November, VRTogether will be joining a line-up of XR companies, investors, and industry experts for a series of online conferences, exhibitions and networking events to explore how immersive technologies shape the world of tomorrow.

The killer app for the internet turned out to be the smart phone and it was already on our desk or even better in our pockets. What could, should and has to happen to Virtual Reality (VR) in order to have the same impact and change the way we work, learn, shop, play and travel. What are today’s most promising use & business cases regarding VR and how can I start tomorrow using this technology? Or is VR at the same point as mobile phones before the introduction of the iPhone and will future “real” social VR need completely different hardware and subsequently applications?

We will interview and challenge several VR and market experts about their vision and expectations towards VR and how it could change our daily private and professional life. What are the biggest problems Virtual Reality can solve and when? And how could a project like VRTogether contribute to all this?

Register for this free interactive Webinar on October 21st and join us shaping the future of Virtual Reality.

In a joint effort with the EU H2020 ImAc and Hyper360 projects, VRTogether co-organized the “First International Workshop on Tools for Creating XR Media Experiences”, co-located with the IEEE ICME 2020 conference, that was planned to be originally held in London (6-10 July). Due to COVID-19, all tracks and side events of the conference were held virtually, and Zoom was selected as the tool to run the workshop on July 6th.

Mario Montagud (i2CAT), Pablo Cesar (CWI) and Dimitris Zarpalas (CERTH) were Organizers of the Workshop, together with Hannes Fassold (JOANNEUM RESEARCH).

The workshop revolved around very relevant topics for VRTogether, which are new approaches, technologies and tools for creating, processing and delivering interactive XR media. It was quite successful, gathering up to 6 relevant contributions from the community on these topics, which fostered rich discussions and interaction. The workshop also included a fascinating opening keynote by Professor Aljosa Smolic (Trinity College Dublin), entitled “Volumetric Video Content Creation for Immersive AR/VR Experiences”, and a very interesting invited talk by Leen Segers (LucidWeb) about XR4ALL project, entitled “XR4ALL – Moving the European XR tech industry forward”.

The workshop was also quite successful in terms of number of attendees, which approximately ranged between 30 and 40 during its evolution.

More information about the program, chairs and presented contributions can be found at the workshop website.

Overall, given the success and the awakened interest, the possibility of organizing a second edition in 2021 – hopefully a physical one – will be assessed in short!

VRTogether project partner CWI participated in the 2020 ACM International Conference on Interactive Media Experiences (ACM IMX 2020), held virtually from June 17-19, 2020. On the first day of the conference, CWI’s team presented the social VR clinic, one of the VRTogether exploitation activities targeting the healthcare domain. The demo is entitled “A Social VR Clinic for Knee Arthritis Patients with Haptics” and was presented using a social virtual reality (VR) platform called Mozilla Hubs. This demo is co-authored by Tong Xue (CWI, BIT), Jie Li (CWI), Guo Chen (IBM Research, Beijing) and Pablo Cesar (CWI). The demo presentation was held in a virtual dome surrounded by virtual Barcelona cultural heritage.

The demo showcases a social VR clinic that allows patients to consult a nurse represented as a virtual avatar. It offers a “walk-in” virtual surgery room, enables patients to interact with animated virtual 3D artifacts, and trains the patient to use an injection tool while wearing a pair of mechanical VR gloves that provide haptic feedback (in collaboration with the Dutch SME SenseGlove). The demo shows the potential of social VR as a new tool to help patients receive remote personalized medical care. The virtual demo presentation showed a video of the prototype and two posters explaining the research process. The whole session was interactive and immersive with many questions raised from the audience. The conference organizing committee and the audience all found the demo well done and gave positive feedback towards the future work.

This demo was eventually awarded the Best Demo award at IMX 2020. IMX is the leading international conference for presentation and discussion of research into interactive media experiences. The conference brought together international researchers and practitioners from a wide range of disciplines, ranging from human-computer interaction, multimedia engineering and design to media studies, media psychology and sociology.

The social VR clinic demo is one of the VRTogether project exploitation activities explored by CWI. Apart from personalized healthcare, where we are as well exploring how 3D medical imaging can help in creating photorealistic models for remote treatment of patients, other domains include:

• Creative industries: interactive immersive museum experiences in social VR for both remote and on-site visitors, together with the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision
• Retail sector: collaborative design and prototyping in social VR for the retail sector, like bakeries and other food services

We will keep you updated with the future development of the social VR use cases.

Jie Li and Pablo Cesar, from the Distributed Interactive Systems group (DIS) at Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI), have successfully organized the ACM CHI2020 Social VR Workshop on a social VR platform called Mozilla Hubs. This workshop was co-organized together with David A. Shamma (FXPAL Laboratory), Vinoba Vinayagamoorthy (BBC R&D), Raz Schwartz (Facebook AR/VR), and Wijnand Ijsselsteijn (Eindhoven University of Technology). Due to the COVID-19, the event, scheduled on April 25 at the Hawaii Convention Center, was cancelled. However, the co-organizers decided to make use of the quarantine as a unique opportunity to explore how a social VR platform could be used to run the workshop. The workshop, “Social VR: ​A New Medium for Remote Communication & Collaboration”, was sponsored by the EU H2020 VRTogether project, and received technical support from Mozilla and FXPAL laboratory.

The workshop attracted mass attention in the ACM SIGCHI community, and on social media. For example, one of the twitter posts received over 13,000 impressions and 1200 engagements. The organizers also received hundreds of requests about participating in the workshop. In the end, the organizers reviewed and selected 20 participants worldwide based on their submitted high-quality position papers (position papers are available at https://www.socialvr-ws.com). The time zones of the participants ranged from GMT-7 (e.g., California, US) to GMT+9 (Tokyo, Japan), but they all managed to meet in this virtual workshop.

The 5-hour virtual workshop was intense, fun and engaging. The virtual workshop space had a main hall with two big screens where the presentation slides or videos could be displayed. Linked with the main hall (Figure 2), there were three breakout virtual rooms for group discussions on assigned topics: user representation & ethics, evaluation methods, and interaction techniques. The breakout rooms ensured that the audio of each group discussion was separated, and would not influence each other. The participants selected their own custom avatars to represent themselves.

The organizers designed an interactive and engaging workshop program, which started with a keynote talk from Professor Blair MacIntyre about his experience of organizing the IEEEVR 2020 conference in Mozilla Hubs (Figure 3a). Then, the big screen showed the slides prepared by participants to introduce themselves and their position paper, and each participant was invited to “fly” next to the big screen to give a 2-minute pitch about their paper. Next, they were divided into three discussion groups based on their preferences for the three pre-defined social VR topics by the organizers (Figure 3b). Finally, the organizers brought all the participants back to the main hall to present the discussion results.

The whole workshop went smoothly. Many participants reported that the activities of the virtual workshop were as engaging as the real physical workshop. It was easy and natural for them to follow the keynote talks and to contribute to the discussions. Even during the break, many participants chose to stay and explore the virtual space (e.g., dive into the virtual sea, see Figure 3c). After obtaining consent from the participants, the organizers managed to collect relevant data about the position, movement, and interaction of the participants in the virtual environment and with each other. Currently, the organizers are continuing the exploration of the possibilities offered by Social VR platforms through an online survey, and semi-structured interviews with the participants.

The workshop ended with fruitful discussions about the future of social VR technology. The participants and the organizers foresee the full potential of social VR as a new medium to connect people across the world, and engage them to communicate and collaborate in a virtual space for hours. Many participants shared their engaging and meaningful virtual conferencing experience on social media, and expressed their appreciation towards the organizers through emails. A full report on how well social VR platforms may support remote scientific events will follow.