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

Mixed Reality Architecture: a dynamic architectural topology

Architecture can be shown to structure patterns of co-presence and in turn to be structured itself by the rules and norms of the society present within it. This two-way relationship exists in a surprisingly stable framework, as fundamental changes to buildings are slow and costly. At the same time, change within organisations is increasingly rapid and buildings are used to accommodate some of that change. This adaptation can be supported by the use of telecommunication technologies, overcoming the need for co-presence during social interaction. However, often this results in a loss of accountability or ‘civic legibility’, as the link between physical location and social activity is broken. In response to these considerations, Mixed Reality Architecture (MRA) was developed. MRA links multiple physical spaces across a shared 3D virtual world. We report on the design of MRA, including the key concept of the Mixed Reality Architectural Cell, a novel architectural interface between architectural spaces that are remote to each other. An in-depth study lasting one year and involving six office-based MRACells, used video recordings, the analysis of event logs, diaries and an interview survey. This produced a series of ethnographic vignettes describing social interaction within MRA in detail. In this paper we concentrate on the topological properties of MRA. It can be shown that the dynamic topology of MRA and social interaction taking place within it are fundamentally intertwined. We discuss how topological adjacencies across virtual space change the integration of the architectural spaces that MRA is installed in. We further reflect on how the placement of MRA technology in different parts of an office space (deep or shallow) impacts on the nature of that particular space. Both the above can be shown to influence movement through the building and social interaction taking place within it. These findings are directly relevant to new buildings that need to be designed to accommodate organisational change in future but also to existing building stock that might be very hard to adapt. We are currently expanding the system to new sites and are planning changes to the infrastructure of MRA as well as its interactional interface

An Immersive Telepresence System using RGB-D Sensors and Head Mounted Display

We present a tele-immersive system that enables people to interact with each other in a virtual world using body gestures in addition to verbal communication. Beyond the obvious applications, including general online conversations and gaming, we hypothesize that our proposed system would be particularly beneficial to education by offering rich visual contents and interactivity. One distinct feature is the integration of egocentric pose recognition that allows participants to use their gestures to demonstrate and manipulate virtual objects simultaneously. This functionality enables the instructor to ef- fectively and efficiently explain and illustrate complex concepts or sophisticated problems in an intuitive manner. The highly interactive and flexible environment can capture and sustain more student attention than the traditional classroom setting and, thus, delivers a compelling experience to the students. Our main focus here is to investigate possible solutions for the system design and implementation and devise strategies for fast, efficient computation suitable for visual data processing and network transmission. We describe the technique and experiments in details and provide quantitative performance results, demonstrating our system can be run comfortably and reliably for different application scenarios. Our preliminary results are promising and demonstrate the potential for more compelling directions in cyberlearning.Comment: IEEE International Symposium on Multimedia 201

Information & communication technologies - panacea for traffic congestion?

As road pricing, telematics and logistics evolve, information and communication technologies (ICT) aim directly at making traffic flow more efficiently in a given infrastructure. Furthermore, the virtual world gives rise to new business fields and decentralised structures which affect the development of transport indirectly. While technological progress continues to drive qualitative improvements in traffic conditions, e-business and telework in particular have, for structural reasons, a much less pronounced effect on traffic than widely presumed. ICT helps in organising traffic flows more efficiently and plays a supplementary role as transport-relevant instrument, but it is not a panacea for traffic congestion.traffic, autobahn, ICT, LBS, mobile telephony

Information and communication technologies for public use and interactive-multimedia city kiosks

Thesis (Master)--Izmir Institute of Technology, Industrial Design, Izmir, 2004Includes bibliographical references (leaves: 103)Text in English; Abstract: Turkish and Englishix, 106 leavesThis thesis provides framework for consideration of the potential of information andcommunication technologies for public events and performances for the developing usage of new products, particularly information public kiosks. In the theoretical framework, the concepts and terms of information and communication technology are generally introduced along with the identification of number of major factors such as elements, diversity, necessity and evolution. Moreover, the importance of ICT technologies in urban settings and human behavior in response to this type of technology are investigated through the history of ICT. The concept of the usage of information and communication technology by actual people is particularly emphasized. Not only the utilization of information and communication technology in public space is described but also effective usage of ICT in the public space and information access provided by public products are identified.Figures of ICT systems and related products, their roots in design differences and new tools and products that are common examples of ICT, particularly the use of the information city kiosk, are presented and discussed. Design principles of the public information kiosk, which play a prominent role in the public use of ICT, are established. The analysis of design factors and human-product relations based on user profile, material choices, form, function and location are discussed. Finally, the thesis includes a conclusion that argues that the information city kiosks and their increased public use will designate the new images of the cities

The Evolution of First Person Vision Methods: A Survey

The emergence of new wearable technologies such as action cameras and smart-glasses has increased the interest of computer vision scientists in the First Person perspective. Nowadays, this field is attracting attention and investments of companies aiming to develop commercial devices with First Person Vision recording capabilities. Due to this interest, an increasing demand of methods to process these videos, possibly in real-time, is expected. Current approaches present a particular combinations of different image features and quantitative methods to accomplish specific objectives like object detection, activity recognition, user machine interaction and so on. This paper summarizes the evolution of the state of the art in First Person Vision video analysis between 1997 and 2014, highlighting, among others, most commonly used features, methods, challenges and opportunities within the field.Comment: First Person Vision, Egocentric Vision, Wearable Devices, Smart Glasses, Computer Vision, Video Analytics, Human-machine Interactio