QoE and Immersive Media: A New Challenge

Abstract

In the past 20 years the "Quality of Experience" (QoE) has increasingly become a necessary aspect to be taken into account by the multimedia industry. In fact, the QoE has allowed to extend the concept of image quality by considering other aspects to evaluate "the delight or annoyance of a customer's experiences with a service" [1]. The concept of QoE is extremely important since it has a big impact on several fields, ranging from the acquisition to the rendering of multimedia contents. Many works can be found in literature that address the problem of evaluating the QoE for 2D and 3D contents but nowadays we are facing a new challenging task: to study the QoE for immersive media. When talking about immersive media we are referring to different types of multimedia that allow the users to explore the content in their personal way thus introducing a new and important variable to be considered while evaluating the QoE. In particular, recent years have witnessed the spread of Virtual and Augmented Reality that allow the users to be involved in a more realistic and deep way in the artificial multimedia content or to interact with virtual objects [2]. In this new scenario we are moving to the concept of "personal" QoE that encompasses many open questions that are still unanswered such as: which is the impact of the rendering system on the QoE, how important are the viewing conditions, how can we account for the immersive media content way of exploration, can the study of multimedia saliency help in understanding the QoE [3]? In this talk we will address these open questions to explore what are the current research findings and trends and I will give you an insight of what will come next.