Toward hyper-realistic and interactive social VR experiences in live TV scenarios

© 2022 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes,creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.Social Virtual Reality (VR) allows multiple distributed users getting together in shared virtual environments to socially interact and/or collaborate. This article explores the applicability and potential of Social VR in the broadcast sector, focusing on a live TV show use case. For such a purpose, a novel and lightweight Social VR platform is introduced. The platform provides three key outstanding features compared to state-of-the-art solutions. First, it allows a real-time integration of remote users in shared virtual environments, using realistic volumetric representations and affordable capturing systems, thus not relying on the use of synthetic avatars. Second, it supports a seamless and rich integration of heterogeneous media formats, including 3D scenarios, dynamic volumetric representation of users and (live/stored) stereoscopic 2D and 180º/360º videos. Third, it enables low-latency interaction between the volumetric users and a video-based presenter (Chroma keying), and a dynamic control of the media playout to adapt to the session’s evolution. The production process of an immersive TV show to be able to evaluate the experience is also described. On the one hand, the results from objective tests show the satisfactory performance of the platform. On the other hand, the promising results from user tests support the potential impact of the presented platform, opening up new opportunities in the broadcast sector, among others.This work has been partially funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 program, under agreement nº 762111 (VRTogether project), and partially by ACCIÓ, under agreement COMRDI18-1-0008 (ViVIM project). Work by Mario Montagud has been additionally funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities with a Juan de la Cierva – Incorporación grant (reference IJCI-2017-34611). The authors would also like to thank the EU H2020 VRTogether project consortium for their relevant and valuable contributions.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Successful scaling in social franchising: The case of Impact Hub

Social entrepreneurs increasingly use franchising to scale social value. Tracey and Jarvis (2007) described how social franchising is similar to commercial franchising, but also noted critical challenges arising from dual social and commercial goals. We investigate a social franchisor that overcame these challenges and describe how the social mission became the source of innovation for its business model. We show that the social mission fostered a shared identity that motivated and guided the search for adaptations to the franchise model. In particular, the shared mission-driven identity created pressure toward (1) decentralized decision-making, (2) shared governance, and (3) a new role for the franchisor as orchestrator of collaborative knowledge sharing among franchisees. Findings should help social franchisors avoid common pitfalls and suggest future research questions for social entrepreneurship and franchising scholars

Ecosystem synergies, change and orchestration

This thesis investigates ecosystem synergies, change, and orchestration. The research topics are motivated by my curiosity, a fragmented research landscape, theoretical gaps, and new phenomena that challenge extant theories. To address these motivators, I conduct literature reviews to organise existing studies and identify their limited assumptions in light of new phenomena. Empirically, I adopt a case study method with abductive reasoning for a longitudinal analysis of the Alibaba ecosystem from 1999 to 2020. My findings provide an integrated and updated conceptualisation of ecosystem synergies that comprises three distinctive but interrelated components: 1) stack and integrate generic resources for efficiency and optimisation, 2) empower generative changes for variety and evolvability, and 3) govern tensions for sustainable growth. Theoretically grounded and empirically refined, this new conceptualisation helps us better understand the unique synergies of ecosystems that differ from those of alternative collective organisations and explain the forces that drive voluntary participation for value co-creation. Regarding ecosystem change, I find a duality relationship between intentionality and emergence and develop a phasic model of ecosystem sustainable growth with internal and external drivers. This new understanding challenges and extends prior discussions on their dominant dualism view, focus on partial drivers, and taken-for-granted lifecycle model. I propose that ecosystem orchestration involves systematic coordination of technological, adoption, internal, and institutional activities and is driven by long-term visions and adjusted by re-visioning. My analysis reveals internal orchestration's important role (re-envisioning, piloting, and organisation architectural reconfiguring), the synergy and system principles in designing adoption activities, and the expanding arena of institutional activities. Finally, building on the above findings, I reconceptualise ecosystems and ecosystem sustainable growth to highlight multi-stakeholder value creation, inclusivity, long-term orientation and interpretative approach. The thesis ends with discussing the implications for practice, policy, and future research.Open Acces

The Complexity of Owning the Customer Within Ecosystems : A study of owning the customer within ecosystems

This thesis explores the phenomenon of owning the customer within business ecosystems. Business ecosystems are complex entities where dissimilar organisations jointly deliver value to the customer by balancing cooperation and competition. While businesses need to collaborate to deliver value, they instinctively compete, creating friction between actors within an ecosystem. This situation may then raise the question of who has access to, and can gain, customer ownership. To date, limited research on owning the customer in an ecosystem setting has been conducted. The main aim of this thesis is therefore to understand what it means to own the customer in an ecosystem and discover how an ecosystem actor can obtain ownership. This paper is conducted as an exploratory multi-case study, analysing secondary data from 15 semi-structured interviews mainly from the retail industry. The empirical findings are assessed with existing literature on owning the customer and business ecosystems in general, to better understand customer ownership in an ecosystem setting. The findings of this study suggest that owning the customer can be defined as having direct and/or indirect ties with the customer in ways that optimise firms’ individual value capture within an ecosystem and maximise joint value creation potential for the customer. Ties in this setting relate to a firm communicating with customers and/or obtaining the needed customer data from the ecosystem’s customer journey. Moreover, the findings of this study also suggest that the roles actors adopt within ecosystems are decisive in the allocation of who gets to own the customer. The orchestrators of ecosystems seem more likely to obtain ownership as they have more power in the ecosystem structure. Nevertheless, the findings highlight that orchestrators’ desire for sole ownership increases friction between them and their complementors. This friction seems to complicate the ecosystem’s function of jointly creating more value as it hinders cooperation. Therefore, the findings argue that creating a sound relation between actors would be necessary to share ownership of the customer and thus ensure stronger value creation. Finally, as this thesis mainly aims to define owning the customer and to understand who owns the customer in an ecosystem, future research should be conducted on how power imbalance between actors might negatively influence the overall value proposition of an ecosystem.nhhma

Techno-Economic Assessment in Communications: New Challenges

This article shows a brief history of Techno-Economic Assessment (TEA) in Communications, a proposed redefinition of TEA as well as the new challenges derived from a dynamic context with cloud-native virtualized networks, the Helium Network & alike blockchain-based decentralized networks, the new network as a platform (NaaP) paradigm, carbon pricing, network sharing, and web3, metaverse and blockchain technologies. The authors formulate the research question and show the need to improve TEA models to integrate and manage all this increasing complexity. This paper also proposes the characteristics TEA models should have and their current degree of compliance for several use cases: 5G and beyond, software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN), secure access service edge (SASE), secure service edge (SSE), and cloud cybersecurity risk assessment. The authors also present TEA extensibility to request for proposals (RFP) processes and other industries, to conclude that there is an urgent need for agile and effective TEA in Comms that allows industrialization of agile decision-making for all market stakeholders to choose the optimal solution for any technology, scenario and use case.Comment: 18 pages, 1 figure, 2 table

Intent-based zero-touch service chaining layer for software-defined edge cloud networks

Edge Computing, along with Software Defined Networking and Network Function Virtualization, are causing network infrastructures to become as distributed clouds extended to the edge with services provided as dynamically established sequences of virtualized functions (i.e., dynamic service chains) thereby elastically addressing different processing requirements of application data flows. However, service operators and application developers are not inclined to deal with descriptive configuration directives to establish and operate services, especially in case of service chains. Intent-based Networking is emerging as a novel approach that simplifies network management and automates the implementation of network operations required by applications. This paper presents an intent-based zero-touch service chaining layer that provides the programmable provision of service chain paths in edge cloud networks. In addition to the dynamic and elastic deployment of data delivery services, the intent-based layer offers an automated adaptation of the service chains paths according to the application's goals expressed in the intent to recover from sudden congestion events in the SDN network. Experiments have been carried out in an emulated network environment to show the feasibility of the approach and to evaluate the performance of the intent layer in terms of network resource usage and adaptation overhead

Technology-enhanced Personalised Learning: Untangling the Evidence

Technology-enhanced personalised learning is not yet common in Germany, which is why we have tasked scientists with summarising the current status of international research on the matter. This study demonstrates the great potential of technology in implementing effective personalised learning. Nevertheless, it has not been assessed yet whether the practical implementation actually works: Even in countries such as the U.S., which lead the way in using techology in classroom settings, hardly any evaluation studies have been done to prove the effectiveness of technology-enhanced personalised learning. In the light of the above, the authors make recommendations for actions to be taken in Germany to make best use of the potential of technology in providing individual support and guidance to students