Quality, Presence, Empathy, Attitude, and Attention in 360-degree Videos for Immersive Communications

Most literature has already shown that virtual reality, concretely, 360-degrees video can have influence on affective skills in multiple applications from education to medicine. This thesis aims to go one step further, real-time 360-degree video communications. Researchers commonly based their experiments on controlled environments and participants with specific characteristics which reduce the reproducibility and ecological validity of the methodologies. We propose to design a methodology based on questionnaires and the use of biosensors to jointly assess technical and socioemotional features in bidirectional immersive communications. For that, we first present some research questions and then choose the tools, stimuli, and use case to answer them. The use case selected as starting point to validate the methodology is tele-education. This thesis is an invitation to leave the comfort zone and question the usage of methodologies that have been highly proven with previous technologies, but which may as well be insufficient to address the challenges of new communications.