Title
Not Alone Here?! Scalability and User Experience of Embodied Ambient Crowds in Distributed Social Virtual Reality.
Abstract
This article investigates performance and user experience in Social Virtual Reality (SVR) targeting distributed, embodied, and immersive, face-to-face encounters. We demonstrate the close relationship between scalability, reproduction accuracy, and the resulting performance characteristics, as well as the impact of these characteristics on users co-located with larger groups of embodied virtual others. System scalability provides a variable number of co-located avatars and AI-controlled agents with a variety of different appearances, including realistic-looking virtual humans generated from photogrammetry scans. The article reports on how to meet the requirements of embodied SVR with today's technical off-the-shelf solutions and what to expect regarding features, performance, and potential limitations. Special care has been taken to achieve low latencies and sufficient frame rates necessary for reliable communication of embodied social signals. We propose a hybrid evaluation approach which coherently relates results from technical benchmarks to subjective ratings and which confirms required performance characteristics for the target scenario of larger distributed groups. A user-study reveals positive effects of an increasing number of co-located social companions on the quality of experience of virtual worlds, i.e., on presence, possibility of interaction, and co-presence. It also shows that variety in avatar/agent appearance might increase eeriness but might also stimulate an increased interest of participants about the environment.
Year
DOI
Venue
2019
10.1109/TVCG.2019.2899250
IEEE transactions on visualization and computer graphics
Keywords
Field
DocType
Avatars,Open area test sites,Scalability,Animation,Bandwidth,Tracking
Crowds,Metaverse,User experience design,Virtual reality,Computer science,Embodied cognition,Theoretical computer science,Human–computer interaction,Quality of experience,Avatar,Scalability
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
25
5
1941-0506
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
5
0.39
19
Authors
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Marc Erich Latoschik151576.83
Florian Kern261.09
Jan-Philipp Stauffert3133.31
Andrea Bartl461.75
Mario Botsch52385116.10
Jean-Luc Lugrin638338.87