Methodology to Assess Quality, Presence, Empathy, Attitude, and Attention in 360-degree Videos for Immersive Communications
This work addresses the need for standardized assessment methods in VR communications, particularly for socioemotional factors, but is incremental as it adapts existing methodologies to a new context.
This paper tackled the problem of jointly assessing quality, presence, empathy, attitude, and attention in 360-degree videos for immersive communications by conducting an experiment with 54 participants across three conditions, validating that video quality experiments can be adapted to evaluate socioemotional features and showing that acquisition perspective influences social presence.
This paper analyzes the joint assessment of quality, spatial and social presence, empathy, attitude, and attention in three conditions: (A)visualizing and rating the quality of contents in a Head-Mounted Display (HMD), (B)visualizing the contents in an HMD,and (C)visualizing the contents in an HMD where participants can see their hands and take notes. The experiment simulates an immersive communication where participants attend conversations of different genres and from different acquisition perspectives in the context of international experiences. Video quality is evaluated with Single-Stimulus Discrete Quality Evaluation (SSDQE) methodology. Spatial and social presence are evaluated with questionnaires adapted from the literature. Initial empathy is assessed with Interpersonal Reactivity Index(IRI) and a questionnaire is designed to evaluate attitude. Attention is evaluated with 3 questions that had pass/fail answers. 54 participants were evenly distributed among A, B, and C conditions taking into account their international experience backgrounds, obtaining a diverse sample of participants. The results from the subjective test validate the proposed methodology in VR communications, showing that video quality experiments can be adapted to conditions imposed by experiments focused on the evaluation of socioemotional features in terms of contents of long-duration, actor and observer acquisition perspectives, and genre. In addition, the positive results related to the sense of presence imply that technology can be relevant in the analyzed use case. The acquisition perspective greatly influences social presence and all the contents have a positive impact on all participants on their attitude towards international experiences. The annotated dataset, Student Experiences Around the World dataset (SEAW-dataset), obtained from the experiment is made publicly available.