QoE Studies on Interactive 3D Tele-Immersion
Users' Quality of Experience (QoE) in Interactive 3D Tele-Immersion (i3DTI) systems is influenced by several factors such as the quality of the "live" 3D avatars of the users, network latency, rendering methodology (head mounted display or regular TV type of display), etc. Hence, it becomes important to answer the question: "Is Visual Quality (VQ) the only factor to be considered or do better immersion and faster interactions matter, in having good QoE?" To answer this question, in this paper, a highly optimized state-of-the-art i3DTI framework implementation is introduced along with a soccer-inspired penalty shootout game. This game allows users to experience various situations, view different angles, perceive delays, track virtual ball motion, and play naturally using their entire bodies. A head mounted display device - Oculus Rift allows the users to get completely immersed and perform better in the penalty shootout game compared to watching themselves play on a 3D TV. This scenario is obtained in a controlled lab setting with ultra-high-speed network that has ultra-low latency, high VQ, fast and realistic interactions. Such ideal conditions are not typically available in a wide area Internet. Hence, for faster interaction scenario, we used lesser RGB-D cameras for 3D reconstruction, thereby reducing the model quality significantly. The high responsiveness of the game masked the user's perception of quality, and resulted in them not noticing the lower VQ of the reconstructed 3D models. Based on the results from the user study that focused on immersion, interaction and VQ aspects; users felt the game to be visually appealing, intuitive, engaging, and highly entertaining in all of the scenarios.