APlausE-MR - Audiovisual Plausibility and Experience in Multi-Party Mixed Reality

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APlausE-MR focuses on distributed multi-party mixed reality (MR) scenarios that involve groups of collocated and remote users. It is our hypothesis that realistic audiovisual virtual environments contribute mainly to the place illusion, the sense of being there, but that creating and maintaining the illusion of plausibility, the sensation of what is happening is real, also requires avatar representations that look, behave and sound credible. Here, the usage of participant representations based on 3D-video-capture will be compared to classic avatar-type representations. Furthermore, supporting the users’ natural interaction with the virtual environment and with each other promotes the credibility of the experience through joint perception. These factors mutually reinforce plausibility and can even compensate each other in case of imperfections. To validate this hypothesis our proposed research addresses three main challenges: (1) The development and integration of the audiovisual technologies that enable plausible communication within a group and between groups in virtual worlds, (2) the identification and qualification of factors influencing the plausibility of audiovisual experiences in multi-party IVEs and (3) the development of suitable evaluation methods and technologies for the analysis of user and group behavior in collocated and distributed audiovisual IVEs. The PhD students of this project will be supported by three research groups with significant expertise in multi-user virtual reality, immersive telepresence, highly realistic spatial audio experiences, and the assessment of the quality of experience in audiovisual environments and for multi-party communication.