Special Session 2: Down the Rabbit Hole – General Aspects of VR and the Immersion Experience

• Raimund Schatz, Austrian Institute of Technology (AIT), Austria
• Christian Timmerer, Alpen-Adria-Universität (AAU) Klagenfurt, Austria
• Judith Redi, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands

Motivation

Currently, we witness a proliferation of new products and applications based on immersive media technologies – exemplified best by the current “VR hype” causing a flurry of new devices and applications to hit the market place. The potential of immersive media is large, however, investigation and application of QoE in this context is still in its infancy as many issues are not yet understood. Consequently, the multimedia-quality community faces new, rapidly moving research targets, resulting in the following overarching questions:

• What is the interplay between concepts like Immersion, Presence, Interactivity, Multimedia Quality and User Experience in the context of emerging immersive applications and technologies?
• What should be the role of QoE in this domain?
• How to characterize, assess, model and manage QoE for immersive media-rich applications?

This special session aims to bring together researchers and practitioners to present and discuss quality-related issues and topics in the field of immersive media. The goal is to highlight the major challenges the multimedia quality community should target in this dynamically evolving domain and identify ways forward to addressing them effectively.

Thursday, June 1, 2017, 13:00 – 15:00 (see daily program)

1. Chenyan Zhang, Andrew Perkis and Sebastian Arndt, Spatial Immersion versus Emotional Immersion, Which is More Immersive?
2. Conor Keighrey, Ronan Flynn, Siobhan Murray and Niall Murray, A QoE Evaluation of Augmented and Immersive Virtual Reality Speech & Language Assessment Applications 
3. Raimund Schatz, Andreas Sackl, Christian Timmerer and Bruno Gardlo, Towards Subjective Quality of Experience Assessment for Omnidirectional Video Streaming
4. Ashutosh Singla, Stephan Fremerey, Werner Robitza and Alexander Raake, Measuring and Comparing QoE and Simulator Sickness of Omnidirectional Videos in Different Head Mounted Displays
5. Yashas Rai, Patrick Le Callet and Philippe Guillotel, Which saliency weighting for omni directional image quality assessment?
6. Evgeniy Upenik, Martin Rerabek and Touradj Ebrahimi, On the Performance of Objective Metrics for Omnidirectional Visual Content

The special session format will be as follows:

• 15min slots per presentation (12-13min talk, 1min for 1 question, 1-2 min time for speaker change)
• 30min for panel discussion

Panel Discussion

For the panel discussion, our aim is to address the following questions:

1. What is your understanding of a fully immersive experience (provide a definition or propose keywords to characterize immersive experiences)?
2. Which aspects should the QoMEX community focus on?
3. What can we learn and which knowledge can we re-use from the 3D and HDR research experiences?