Social VR With Holographic Comms: Enablers for New Engaging Experiences Within the TV / Video Consumption Landscape

Social Virtual Reality (VR) enables shared media experiences between remote people inside immersive and realistic 3D spaces, providing richer and more natural interactions than in classical 2D social conferencing tools. Likewise, the benefits and engagement can even be magnified by integrating realistic and volumetric user representations (i.e., 3D holograms) in these virtual environments rather than synthetic avatars. This paper presents the design and evaluation of an interactive Social VR scenario for a joint and collaborative exploration of a catalogue of professional video clips by a broadcaster. On the one hand, the scenario includes a control panel to select the desired year and clip. After the year selection, a time travel through a lift effect is enforced to teleport users through a multi-level semi-open building in which each level / floor represents one year, and its look-and-feel is customized to resemble that year. On the other hand, the scenario allows the integration of up to four users represented as 3D holograms (full-body and full volume Point Clouds), each one with his/her own screen for video consumption, and arranged in a cross 360<sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">∘</sup> shape to allow for a natural visual interaction among themselves. The evaluation results with <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">N=48</i> professionals of the broadcast sector not only provide relevant insights about the technical requirements and obtained performance, but confirm the satisfactory user experience (in terms of presence, togetherness, quality of interaction) provided by the presented technology and VR scenario and, most importantly, reveal and contribute to identifying the potential and opportunities of Social VR in the broadcast / video consumption landscape.