Towards SocialVR: Evaluating a Novel Technology for Watching Videos Together

TL;DR

This paper evaluates a lightweight, real-time Social VR platform that enables remote users to interact in a shared virtual environment, demonstrating positive user experiences and potential commercial applications.

Contribution

It introduces a novel Social VR platform with a new experimental protocol, a production workflow, and empirical evaluation involving end-users and professionals.

Findings

End-users felt emotionally connected and communicated effortlessly.

Participants rated the experience as similar to face-to-face interactions.

Professionals see commercial potential and recommend further research.

Abstract

Social VR enables people to interact over distance with others in real-time. It allows remote people, typically represented as avatars, to communicate and perform activities together in a join shared virtual environment, extending the capabilities of traditional social platforms like Facebook and Netflix. This paper explores the benefits and drawbacks provided by a lightweight and low-cost Social VR platform (SocialVR), in which users are captured by several cameras and reconstructed in real-time. In particular, the paper contributes with (1) the design and evaluation of an experimental protocol for Social VR experiences; (2) the report of a production workflow for this new type of media experiences; and (3) the results of experiments with both end-users (N=15 pairs) and professionals (N=25) to evaluate the potential of the SocialVR platform. Results from the questionnaires and semi-structured interviews show that end-users rated positively towards the experiences provided by the SocialVR platform, which enabled them to sense emotions and communicate effortlessly. End-users perceived the photo-realistic experience of SocialVR similar to face-to-face scenarios and appreciated this new creative medium. From a commercial perspective, professionals confirmed the potential of this communication medium and encourage further research for the adoption of the platform in the commercial landscape