Bernd Froehlich’s research while affiliated with Technische Universität Ilmenau and other places

Immersive recordings capture virtual reality interactions and are used in various contexts such as education and entertainment. However, there has been only limited research on requirements and techniques for editing such recordings. We interviewed expert editors of video recordings to understand their workflows, familiarised them with immersive recordings, and asked them about what editing challenges and capabilities they can envision for immersive recordings. The experts identified several functionalities they considered relevant for editing, including viewer placement, control over the viewer’s size, support for live and asynchronous collaboration, and different transition types.

Keeping in social contact with friends and family and engaging in social and enjoyable activities is important for our well-being – especially for older adults, who often live distant from loved ones. A new opportunity is provided by Social VR (SVR) for engaging in shared activities beyond just talk. We present findings from interviews with older and young adults on their needs and desires for social VR, especially regarding the types of activity they would like to engage in. We compare these findings to identify differences, commonalities, and opportunities for inter-generational social VR activities. Despite the favoring of cultural (older) and sport (younger adults) interactions, both users groups preferred low-intensity and game-like activities that allow for ongoing conversation and ’sharing the moment’. Furthermore, ease of use, realistic avatars and the mitigation of age-related differences were core requirements for the older demographic.

Virtual Reality (VR) has become an important tool for conducting behavioral studies in realistic, reproducible environments. In this paper, we present ISA, an Immersive Study Analyzer system designed for the comprehensive analysis of social VR studies. For in-depth analysis of participant behavior, ISA records all user actions, speech, and the contextual environment of social VR studies. A key feature is the ability to review and analyze such immersive recordings collaboratively in VR, through support of behavioral coding and user-defined analysis queries for efficient identification of complex behavior. Respatialization of the recorded audio streams enables analysts to follow study participants' conversations in a natural and intuitive way. To support phases of close and loosely coupled collaboration, ISA allows joint and individual temporal navigation, and provides tools to facilitate collaboration among users at different temporal positions. An expert review confirms that ISA effectively supports collaborative immersive analysis, providing a novel and effective tool for nuanced understanding of user behavior in social VR studies

Collaborative work in social virtual reality often requires an interplay of loosely coupled collaboration from different virtual locations and tightly coupled face-to-face collaboration. Without appropriate system mediation, however, transitioning between these phases requires high navigation and coordination efforts. In this paper, we present an interaction system that allows collaborators in virtual reality to seamlessly switch between different collaboration models known from related work. To this end, we present collaborators with functionalities that let them work on individual sub-tasks in different virtual locations, consult each other using asymmetric interaction patterns while keeping their current location, and temporarily or permanently join each other for face-to-face interaction. We evaluated our methods in a user study with 32 participants working in teams of two. Our quantitative results indicate that delegating the target selection process for a long-distance teleport significantly improves placement accuracy and decreases task load within the team. Our qualitative user feedback shows that our system can be applied to support flexible collaboration. In addition, the proposed interaction sequence received positive evaluations from teams with varying VR experiences.

Virtual Reality (VR) enables users to meet, converse, and collaborate in shared virtual environments. For such commu- nication systems, many system factors can affect user experience and perception. To effectively allocate system resources, under- standing of the relative influence of such factors is required. One important factor is a spatial auralization, which has been shown to elevate users’ experience in traditional and single-user VR systems. However, its effect in multi-party social VR has not been fully investigated. In this work, we conducted a study assessing the effect of spatial audio on audiovisual plausibility and presence perception in a three-user interactive communication scenario. Triads of participants perform a collaborative conversation task under three conditions: a VR condition with binaural spatial audio, a VR condition with simple diotic audio, and a real-world reference condition. This paper presents the results of the study based on questionnaire-based evaluation.

Spatial audio representations have been shown to positively impact user experience in traditional, non-immersive communication media. While spatial audio also contributes to presence in single-user immersive VR, its impact in virtual communication scenarios has not yet been fully understood. This work aims to further investigate which communication scenarios benefit from spatial audio representations. We present a study in which pairs of interlocutors undertake a collaborative task in an audiovisual Virtual Environment (VE) under different auralization and scene arrangement conditions. The novel task is designed to encourage simultaneous conversation and movement, with the aim of increasing the relevance of spatial hearing. Results are obtained through questionnaires measuring social presence and plausibility, as well as through conversational and behavioral analysis. Although participants are shown to favor binaural auralization over diotic audio in a direct active-listening comparison, no significant differences in social presence, plausibility, or communication behavior could be found. Our results suggest that spatial audio may not affect user experience in dyadic communication scenarios where spatial auditory information is not directly relevant to the considered task.

Standing in a large crowd can be uncomfortable and usually results in other users obstructing the view of the virtual environment. In this paper, we present four techniques designed to improve the user’s view in crowded environments. Inspired by related work on various transparency and clipping techniques, as well as observed user behavior in crowded scenarios, our paper addresses the visibility problem by locally manipulating the appearance of other users. Three of our techniques define a region of interest using a handheld f lashlight metaphor. Depending on the technique, occluding users are either pushed to the side, scaled, or made partially transparent. The fourth technique allows users to vertically adjust their position. A user study with 24 participants found that the transparency technique was advantageous for quick search tasks. However, in a realistic museum setting, no clear favorite could be determined because the techniques make different trade-offs and users weighted these aspects differently. In a final ranking, the vertical position adjustment and transparency techniques were the most popular, but the scaling technique and vertical position adjustment were found to be the most natural.