The project is being funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) within the DFG priority programme Auditory Cognition in Interactive Virtual Environments (AUDICTIVE).
AUDICTIVE website
Project duration: April 2021 - March 2024
Project description
The project "Audiovisual Plausibility and Experience in Multi-Party Mixed Reality" (APlausE-MR) aims to investigate human audiovisual perception and cognition as well as social interaction in distributed multi-party mixed reality (MR) communication scenarios. A major goal of the project is to gain a robust understanding of the factors influencing the plausibility and quality of virtual audiovisual experiences while jointly being immersed in realistic Interactive Virtual Environments (IVEs).
The working hypothesis is that realistic audiovisual IVEs contribute mainly to the place illusion, the sense of being there, but that creating and maintaining the illusion of plausibility, the sensation of what is happening is real, also requires realistic user representations that look, behave and sound credible. Here, the usage of participant representations based on 3D-video-capture will be compared to classic avatar-type representations. Furthermore, supporting the users’ natural interaction with the virtual environment and with each other promotes the credibility of the experience through joint perception. These factors mutually reinforce plausibility and can even compensate each other in case of imperfections and known technical limitations.
To validate this hypothesis, the research includes the development and integration of audiovisual technologies that enable plausible communication within a group and between groups in virtual worlds as well as the identification and qualification of factors influencing the plausibility of audiovisual experiences in multi-party IVEs. In addition, suitable evaluation methods and technologies for the analysis of user and group behaviour in such scenarios will be developed. This will guide the design and implementation of future IVEs that enable close-to-real-life social experiences and communication.
Project partners
Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, Virtual Reality and Visualization Research Group
TU Ilmenau, Electronic Media Technology Group
Project Manager
Prof. Dr.-Ing. Alexander Raake
Project staff and contact person
M. Sc. Felix Immohr
