DFG-Project AUDICTIVE QoEVAVE

The project is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) within the DFG Priority Program Auditory Cognition in Interactive Virtual Environments (AUDICTIVE).

AUDICTIVE-Website

Project duration: January 2021 - December 2023

Project description

Interactive virtual environments (IVEs) aim to replace real-world sensory input with corresponding streams of artificial stimulation. If successful, such a replacement will make the technology transparent and allow the user to interact naturally in a virtual world. IVEs bring new challenges to quality evaluation and render current evaluation approaches in the audio and video communities partially inapplicable. The QoEVAVE project aims at finding and closing the gaps in current quality evaluation methodologies for audio and video, and examines the feasibility of inferring quality from human behavior in an IVE. IVEs are multimodal and allow 3- or 6-degrees-of-freedom movement in the virtual scene. Compared to a uni-modal scenario, state-of-the-art research shows that multimodal sensory stimulation has significant effects on the resulting object localization, attention and quality evaluation.

Regardless, quality evaluation today is mostly conducted within a specific sensory modality and without interaction. The QoEVAVE project draws inspiration from the virtual reality (VR) community and the long history of using indirect methods to investigate cognitive functions of immersion, presence, and performance in IVEs. More specifically, the project builds upon the foundation of quality of experience (QoE) research and integrates methodologies from the VR community to develop the first comprehensive QoE framework for IVEs. Here, the aim is to achieve an integrated view of IVE quality perception as a cognitive process and of cognitive performances on specific tasks as IVE-quality indicators. In summary, the project recognizes the divergence between the VR community and the media technology community and sets its aim to unifying the field with regards to QoE evaluation in IVEs.

Project partner:
Spatial Audio Research Group, FAU Erlangen

Project Manager:
Prof. Dr.-Ing. Alexander Raake

Project staff and contact person:
William Menz, M.Sc.