REVERIE Virtual Hangout: An Immersive Social and Collaborative VR Experience

Introduction

A social media network is a collection of online communication channels that people use to form a community, interact, share content, and collaborate. Facebook alone in 2017 had 2 billion active users (Constine, 2017), while other social media websites followed with a considerable portion of the market (e.g., Twitter with 328 million users (Constine, 2017)). Recent studies have shown that people have started spending less time on social media applications (Tuchinsky, 2016) (Research, February 21, 2018). Although it is unlikely that social media will lose its appeal anytime soon, this decrease in user engagement cannot be ignored. For this reason, companies have already started investing in the future of social media. An area that has attracted interest in the past few years is immersive technologies. Companies like Facebook believe that social media’s future is the adaptation of immersive technologies (Levy). According to analysts, millennials (the largest living generation) value experiences over ownership (Harris, June 16, 2017). These experiences are immersive such as travelling to new places or going to a concert with friends. Existing social media platforms cannot fulfil the human drive to seek immersive experiences. Social media platforms have been designed to make it easier for people to create and share content (e.g., videos, images, text, etc.) online. This content, however, cannot engage people to a level where it becomes an immersive experience. Such experiences are worth remembering and relived.

A promising technology to make the creation of such experiences possible is virtual reality. Although virtual reality has been around for decades in science fiction and research laboratories, recently, it has become a mainstream technology with the release of several VR platforms and software frameworks (e.g., Oculus VR¹ and Steam VR²). The latter has enabled social virtual reality experiences (Mozilla Hubs³, Rumii⁴, RecRoom⁵, Activeworlds⁶, Facebook Horizon⁷ and AltspaceVR⁸). A good example of a social virtual reality experience is Facebook Horizon developed for the Oculus VR platform. The application enables Facebook users to create their avatars and interact with other friends in a virtual space. The application supports a wide range of features such as creating virtual spaces based on 360-degree media (photo or video), real-time avatar puppeteering, 3D sound, haptic input, and the ability to share 2D media. Integrating these elements creates an immersive social VR experience which is not possible on the Facebook platform alone. REVERIE (REal and Virtual Engagement in Realistic Immersive Environments) is an integrated framework designed to enable the creation of such social virtual reality experiences through an easy-to-use workflow (Fechteler et al., 2013) (Wall et al., 2014). Similar to Facebook Horizon, it supports fully puppeted avatars (Apostolakis & Daras, 2015). Puppeteering or avateering virtual humans refers to the process of mapping a user’s natural motion and live performance to a virtual human deforming control element to reproduce the activity during rendering cycles realistically. REVERIE takes virtual human representation a step further by introducing replicas. A replica is a 3D reconstruction of a human user in a virtual environment (VE) using Kinect devices (Alexiadis et al., 2013; Doumanis et al., 2015; Mekuria et al., 2017). The reconstruction takes place in real-time, and it includes both 3D geometry and texture. It also enables users to fully explore the computer-generated space using their body as a controller (e.g., step forward and walk forward in the virtual space).

Using REVERIE as a technological framework, we implemented Virtual Hangout (explained in detail in Section 4), a VR system supporting user scenarios, including socialising and collaborating tasks. The paper presents the outcomes of a study designed to evaluate user immersion, measured as present-based (the perception of being physically present in the computer-generated world (Wirth et al., 2007)) and engagement-based immersion (Brown & Cairns, 2004), in the Virtual Hangout with users of variable computer skills.