In this paper, we describe a user study in which pairs of users watch a video trailer and interact with each other, using two social Virtual Reality (sVR) systems, as well as in a face-to-face condition. The sVR systems are: Facebook Spaces, based on puppet-like customized avatars, and a video-based sVR system using photo-realistic virtual user representations. We collect subjective and objective data to analyze users’ Quality of Experience (QoE) and compare their interaction in VR to that observed during the real-life scenario. Our results show that the experience delivered by the video-based sVR system is comparable with real-life settings, while the puppet-based avatars limit the perceived quality of the interaction. Our protocol for QoE assessment is fully documented to allow replication in similar experiments.
doi.org/10.1109/VR.2019.8798264
IEEE Virtual Reality
Distributed and Interactive Systems

De Simone, F., Li, J., Galvan Debarba, H., El Ali, A., Gunkel, S., & César Garcia, P. S. (2019). Watching videos together in social Virtual Reality: An experimental study on user’s QoE. In Proceedings of 2019 IEEE Virtual Reality (VR) Proceedings (pp. 890–891). doi:10.1109/VR.2019.8798264