IEEE VR 2020

Out of an abundance of caution surrounding COVID-19, the decision has been made to convert the in-person component of VR 2020 into an all-digital conference experience. Thus, on March 22th-26th 2020, the conference VR 2020 was an online event.

Marta Orduna, a PhD student of the GTI (Grupo de Tratamiento de Imágenes), was selected to participate in the Doctoral Consortium, where she presented her work entitled “Quality, Presence, and Emotions in Virtual Reality Communications”. In addition, Marta also attended the main conference, where she presented the paper poster “Evaluating the Influence of the HMD, Usability, and Fatigue in 360VR Video Quality Assessments”. 

Abstract: This doctoral thesis looks for the identification and evaluation of the factors that allow to improve the QoE of a remote client in telepresence and virtual reality scenarios. Specifically, quality and socioemotional concepts such as social and spatial presence, empathy, and emotions of being in a completely different place, as well as communicate and interact with people who are in that place. The main goals of my research are the analysis of the methodologies to evaluate video quality and socioemotional concepts, the implementation of additional tools using ML techniques to improve the QoE, and finally, experiments in real use cases.

Abstract: VR communications present great challenges that should be addressed in subjective assessment methodologies. Thus, the HMD, the usability of controllers and touchpad, or even the fatigue produced by the test session are factors that highly influence the QoE. In addition, in a 360VR scenario, most of the experiments are focused on the evaluation of video quality or the evaluation of socioemotional concepts such as the sense of presence. However, no standardized methodology to evaluate both kinds of concepts is available nowadays. In this paper, we present an experiment where video quality and sense of presence are jointly assessed in two of the most popular HMDs. As a result, we have observed that while presence is affected by the evaluation mechanism or duration of the test, quality is mainly affected by the HMD. This statement implies that methodologies that take into account technical concepts, such as encoding and transmission, and socioemotional concepts are necessary to obtain reliable and robust results of QoE in a VR environment. Video

Marta Orduna received the Bachelor of Engineering in Telecommunication Technologies and Services (intensification in Sound and Image) in 2016 and the Master in Telecommunication Engineering (accredited by ABET) in 2018, both from the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM), Madrid, Spain. She has been a member of the Grupo de Tratamiento de Imágenes (Image Processing Group) at the UPM since 2016. Her current research is in the area of quality, presence, and emotions in virtual reality communications. She has been involved in several projects in collaboration with Alcatel-Lucent and Nokia Bell-Labs. 

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