Quality of experience in telemeetings and videoconferencing: a comprehensive survey

Telemeetings such as audiovisual conferences or virtual meetings play an increasingly important role in our professional and private lives. For that reason, system developers and service providers will strive for an optimal experience for the user, while at the same time optimizing technical and financial resources. This leads to the discipline of Quality of Experience (QoE), an active field originating from the telecommunication and multimedia engineering domains, that strives for understanding, measuring, and designing the quality experience with multimedia technology. This paper provides the reader with an entry point to the large and still growing field of QoE of telemeetings, by taking a holistic perspective, considering both technical and non-technical aspects, and by focusing on current and near-future services. Addressing both researchers and practitioners, the paper first provides a comprehensive survey of factors and processes that contribute to the QoE of telemeetings, followed by an overview of relevant state-of-the-art methods for QoE assessment. To embed this knowledge into recent technology developments, the paper continues with an overview of current trends, focusing on the field of eXtended Reality (XR) applications for communication purposes. Given the complexity of telemeeting QoE and the current trends, new challenges for a QoE assessment of telemeetings are identified. To overcome these challenges, the paper presents a novel Profile Template for characterizing telemeetings from the holistic perspective endorsed in this paper

Proceedings of the EAA Spatial Audio Signal Processing symposium: SASP 2019

International audienc

The quality of experience of next generation audio :exploring system, context and human influence factors

PhD ThesisThe next generation of audio reproduction technology has the potential to deliver immersive and personalised experiences to the user; multichannel with-height loudspeaker arrays and binaural techniques offer 3D audio experiences, whereas objectbased techniques offer possibilities of adapting content to suit the system, context and user. A fundamental process in the advancement of such technology is perceptual evaluation. It is crucial to understand how listeners perceive new technology in order to drive future developments. This thesis explores the experience provided by next generation audio technology by taking a quality of experience (QoE) approach to evaluation. System, context and human factors all influence QoE and in this thesis three case studies are presented to explore the role of these categories of influence factors (IFs) in the context of next generation audio evaluation. Furthermore, these case studies explore suitable methods and approaches for the evaluation of the QoE of next generation audio with respect to its various IFs. Specific contributions delivered from these individual studies include a subjective comparison between soundbar and discrete surround sound technology, the application of the Open Profiling of Quality method to the field of audio evaluation, an understanding of both how and why environmental noise influences preferred audio object balance, an understanding of how the influence of technical audio quality on overall listening experience is related to a range of psychographic variables and an assessment of the impact of binaural processing on overall listening experience. When considering these studies as a whole, the research presented here contributes the thesis that to effectively evaluate the perceived quality of next generation audio, a QoE mindset should be taken that considers system, context and human IFs.Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and the British Broadcasting Corporation Research & Development department (BBC R&D

Concurrency in auditory displays for connected television

Many television experiences depend on users being both willing and able to visually attend to screen-based information. Auditory displays offer an alternative method for presenting this information and could benefit all users. This thesis explores how this may be achieved through the design and evaluation of auditory displays involving varying degrees of concurrency for two television use cases: menu navigation and presenting related content alongside a television show. The first study, on the navigation of auditory menus, looked at onset asynchrony and word length in the presentation of spoken menus. The effects of these on task duration, accuracy and workload were considered. Onset asynchrony and word length both caused significant effects on task duration and accuracy, while workload was only affected by onset asynchrony. An optimum asynchrony was identified, which was the same for both long and short words, but better performance was obtained with the shorter words that no longer overlapped. The second experiment investigated how disruption, workload, and preference are affected when presenting additional content accompanying a television programme. The content took the form of sound from different spatial locations or as text on a smartphone and the programme's soundtrack was either modified or left unaltered. Leaving the soundtrack unaltered or muting it negatively impacted user experience. Removing the speech from the television programme and presenting the secondary content as sound from a smartphone was the best auditory approach. This was found to compare well with the textual presentation, resulting in less visual disruption and imposing a similar workload. Additionally, the thesis reviews the state-of-the-art in television experiences and auditory displays. The human auditory system is introduced and important factors in the concurrent presentation of speech are highlighted. Conclusions about the utility of concurrency within auditory displays for television are made and areas for further work are identified

Seventh Annual Workshop on Space Operations Applications and Research (SOAR 1993), volume 2

This document contains papers presented at the Space Operations, Applications and Research Symposium (SOAR) Symposium hosted by NASA/Johnson Space Center (JSC) and cosponsored by NASA/JSC and U.S. Air Force Materiel Command. SOAR included NASA and USAF programmatic overviews, plenary session, panel discussions, panel sessions, and exhibits. It invited technical papers in support of U.S. Army, U.S. Navy, Department of Energy, NASA, and USAF programs in the following areas: robotics and telepresence, automation and intelligent systems, human factors, life support, and space maintenance and servicing. SOAR was concerned with Government-sponsored research and development relevant to aerospace operations

A Framework for Site-Specific Spatial Audio Applications

As audio recording and reproduction technology has advanced over the past five decades, increasing attention has been paid to recreating the highly spatialised listening experience we understand from our physical environment. This is the logical next step in the quest for increasing audio clarity, particularly as virtual reality gaming and augmented reality experiences become more widespread. This study sought to develop and demonstrate a technical framework for the production of site-specific audio-based works that is user-friendly and cost effective. The system was intended to be used by existing content producers and audio programmers to work collaboratively with a range of site-based organisations such as museums and galleries to produce an audio augmentation of the physicality of the space. This research was guided by four key aims: 1. Demonstrate a compositional method for immersive spatial audio that references the novel physical environment and the listener’s movement within it. 2. Describe a framework for the development and deployment of a spatial audio visitor technology system. 3. Prototype a naturalistic method for the delivery and navigation of contextual information via audio. 4. Deploy, demonstrate, and evaluate a spatial audio experience within a representative environment. The resulting system makes use of a range of existing technologies to provide a development experience and output that meets a clearly defined set of criteria. Furthermore, a case study application has been developed that demonstrates the use of the system to augment a selection of six paintings in a gallery space. For each of these paintings, a creative spatial composition was produced that demonstrates the principles of spatial composition discussed in this thesis. A spoken informational layer sits on top of this acting as a museum audio guide, featuring navigation using head gestures for a hands-free experience. This thesis presents a detailed discussion of the artistic intentions and techniques employed in the production of the six soundscapes, as well as an evaluation of the resulting application in use in a public gallery space

Proceedings of the EAA Joint Symposium on Auralization and Ambisonics 2014

In consideration of the remarkable intensity of research in the field of Virtual Acoustics, including different areas such as sound field analysis and synthesis, spatial audio technologies, and room acoustical modeling and auralization, it seemed about time to organize a second international symposium following the model of the first EAA Auralization Symposium initiated in 2009 by the acoustics group of the former Helsinki University of Technology (now Aalto University). Additionally, research communities which are focused on different approaches to sound field synthesis such as Ambisonics or Wave Field Synthesis have, in the meantime, moved closer together by using increasingly consistent theoretical frameworks. Finally, the quality of virtual acoustic environments is often considered as a result of all processing stages mentioned above, increasing the need for discussions on consistent strategies for evaluation. Thus, it seemed appropriate to integrate two of the most relevant communities, i.e. to combine the 2nd International Auralization Symposium with the 5th International Symposium on Ambisonics and Spherical Acoustics. The Symposia on Ambisonics, initiated in 2009 by the Institute of Electronic Music and Acoustics of the University of Music and Performing Arts in Graz, were traditionally dedicated to problems of spherical sound field analysis and re-synthesis, strategies for the exchange of ambisonics-encoded audio material, and – more than other conferences in this area – the artistic application of spatial audio systems. This publication contains the official conference proceedings. It includes 29 manuscripts which have passed a 3-stage peer-review with a board of about 70 international reviewers involved in the process. Each contribution has already been published individually with a unique DOI on the DepositOnce digital repository of TU Berlin. Some conference contributions have been recommended for resubmission to Acta Acustica united with Acustica, to possibly appear in a Special Issue on Virtual Acoustics in late 2014. These are not published in this collection.European Acoustics Associatio

Evaluating the Perceived Quality of Binaural Technology

This thesis studies binaural sound reproduction from both a technical and a perceptual perspective, with the aim of improving the headphone listening experience for entertainment media audiences. A detailed review is presented of the relevant binaural technology and of the concepts and methods for evaluating perceived quality. A pilot study assesses the application of state-of-the-art binaural rendering systems to existing broadcast programmes, finding no substantial improvements in quality over conventional stereo signals. A second study gives evidence that realistic binaural simulation can be achieved without personalised acoustic calibration, showing promise for the application of binaural technology. Flexible technical apparatus is presented to allow further investigation of rendering techniques and content production processes. Two web-based studies show that appropriate combination of techniques can lead to improved experience for typical audience members, compared to stereo signals, even without personalised rendering or listener head-tracking. Recent developments in spatial audio applications are then discussed. These have made dynamic client-side binaural rendering with listener head-tracking feasible for mass audiences, but also present technical constraints. To limit distribution bandwidth and computational complexity during rendering, loudspeaker virtualisation is widely used. The effects on perceived quality of these techniques are studied in depth for the first time. A descriptive analysis experiment demonstrates that loudspeaker virtualisation during binaural rendering causes degradations to a range of perceptual characteristics and that these vary across other system conditions. A final experiment makes novel use of the check-all-that-apply method to efficiently characterise the quality of seven spatial audio representations and associated dynamic binaural rendering techniques, using single sound sources and complex dramatic scenes. The perceived quality of these different representations varies significantly across a wide range of characteristics and with programme material. These methods and findings can be used to improve the quality of current binaural technology applications