QoE Assessment for cultural heritage fruition through immersive media

Abstract

Extended Reality technologies offer new and exciting perspectives in a wide variety of applications, ranging from entertainment to working and educational environments. However, given their recent development, great effort is still required for developing methods to evaluate their performances and in particular for Quality of Experience assessment. The aim of my Ph.D. is to model how the experience is perceived by users for cultural heritage applications. The use of immersive technologies in this context could help young students approaching the study of art and increase the people's interest in visiting museums and archeological sites. More specifically, the goal of my research is to define an objective metric for Quality of Experience assessment. This task can be very challenging, since each of us perceives and processes an external stimulus in a different and unique way. Therefore, our research group is trying to model users' opinions, engagement, and feelings, by performing subjective experiments in a virtual reality environment. These experiments focus on relating the perceived quality of experience to users' movement in the virtual 3D space. In addition, we also map users' eye movements to investigate where their attention is focused.