Jie Li

Irene Viola, Shishir Subramanyam, Jie Li et al.

Fuelled by the increase in popularity of virtual and augmented reality applications, point clouds have emerged as a popular 3D format for acquisition and rendering of digital humans, thanks to their versatility and real-time capabilities. Due to technological constraints and real-time rendering limitations, however, the visual quality of dynamic point cloud contents is seldom evaluated using virtual and augmented reality devices, instead relying on prerecorded videos displayed on conventional 2D screens. In this study, we evaluate how the visual quality of point clouds representing digital humans is affected by compression distortions. In particular, we compare three different viewing conditions based on the degrees of freedom that are granted to the viewer: passive viewing (2DTV), head rotation (3DoF), and rotation and translation (6DoF), to understand how interacting in the virtual space affects the perception of quality. We provide both quantitative and qualitative results of our evaluation involving 78 participants, and we make the data publicly available. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study evaluating the quality of dynamic point clouds in virtual reality, and comparing it to traditional viewing settings. Results highlight the dependency of visual quality on the content under test, and limitations in the way current data sets are used to evaluate compression solutions. Moreover, influencing factors in quality evaluation in VR, and shortcomings in how point cloud encoding solutions handle visually-lossless compression, are discussed.

Mario Montagud, Jie Li, Gianluca Cernigliario et al.

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