The use of virtual reality (VR) technologies and, in particular, of VR360 content can provide great benefits in the society. This particularly applies to the culture and heritage sectors, where venues, goods and events can be digitalised to provide hyper-realistic and engaging experiences, anywhere and anytime. Despite significant advances in the field of VR, there is still an unexplored aspect which is crucial for every service and experience where user interaction is expected: accessibility. This article firstly reviews the needs, challenges and limitations for making VR360 experiences accessible. Based on these facts, an end-to-end platform to efficiently integrate accessibility services within VR360 content is presented. The platform encompasses all steps from media authoring to media consumption, but special attention is given to the accessibility-enabled VR360 player, as it is the end user interaction interface. The presentation modes for the supported access services (like subtitling, audio description and sign language), interaction modalities and personalisation features supported by the player are described. To conclude, the availability of newly created and adapted culture-related accessible VR360 content is explored, as a proof of the potential of the contributions work in this sector.

Fueled by advances in multi-party communications, increasingly mature immersive technologies being adopted, and the COVID-19 pandemic, a new wave of social virtual reality (VR) platforms have emerged to support socialization, interaction, and collaboration among multiple remote users who are integrated into shared virtual environments. Social VR aims to increase levels of (co-)presence and interaction quality by overcoming the limitations of 2D windowed representations in traditional multi-party video conferencing tools, although most existing solutions rely on 3D avatars to represent users. This article presents a social VR platform that supports real-time volumetric holographic representations of users that are based on point clouds captured by off-the-shelf RGB-D sensors, and it analyzes the platform’s potential for conducting interactive holomeetings (i.e., holoconferencing scenarios). This work evaluates such a platform’s performance and readiness for conducting meetings with up to four users, and it provides insights into aspects of the user experience when using single-camera and low-cost capture systems in scenarios with both frontal and side viewpoints. Overall, the obtained results confirm the platform’s maturity and the potential of holographic communications for conducting interactive multi-party meetings, even when using low-cost systems and single-camera capture systems in scenarios where users are sitting or have a limited translational movement along the X, Y, and Z axes within the 3D virtual environment (commonly known as 3 Degrees of Freedom plus, 3DoF+).

Social Virtual Reality (VR) allows multiple distributed users getting together in shared virtual environments to socially interact and collaborate. This article explores the applicability and potential of Social VR in the broadcast sector, focusing on a live TV show use case, by providing three main contributions: 1) a novel and lightweight social VR platform; 2) a professional piece of VR content to recreate an interactive live TV show; and 3) an analysis of the performance and user experience. The Social VR platform includes different innovative and outstanding features compared to state-of-the-art solutions. It allows a real-time integration of remote users in shared virtual environments, using realistic volumetric representations and affordable capturing systems, thus not relying on the use of synthetic avatars. It supports a seamless and rich integration of heterogeneous media formats, including 3D scenarios, dynamic volumetric representation of users and (live/stored) stereoscopic 2D and 180°/360° videos. In addition, it enables low-latency interaction between volumetric users and a video-based presenter (Chroma keying) and a dynamic control of the media playout to adapt to the session’s evolution. The article also describes the production process of an immersive an interactive TV show to demonstrate the platform’s capabilities and its potential benefits. On the one hand, the results from objective tests show the satisfactory performance of the platform. On the other hand, the promising results from user tests support the potential impact of the presented platform, opening up new opportunities in the broadcast sector.

Since watching movies is a social experience for most people, it is important to know how an application should be designed for enabling shared cinematic virtual reality (CVR) experiences via head-mounted displays (HMDs). Viewers can feel isolated when watching omnidirectional movies with HMDs. Even if they are watching the movie simultaneously, they do not automatically see the same field of view, since they can freely choose their viewing direction. Our goal is to explore interaction techniques to efficiently support social viewing and to improve social movie experiences in CVR. Based on the literature review and insights from earlier work, we identify seven challenges that need to be addressed: communication, field-of-view (FoV) awareness, togetherness, accessibility, interaction techniques, synchronization, and multiuser environments. We investigate four aspects (voice chat, sending emotion states, FoV indication, and video chat) to address some of the challenges and report the results of four user studies. Finally, we present and discuss a design space for CVR social movie applications and highlight directions for future work.

Accessibility is a key requirement for any multimedia tool and application. With the current trend towards immersive experiences, such as Virtual Reality (VR) and 360^o video, it becomes key that these environments are adapted to be fully accessible. However, until recently the focus has been mostly on adapting the existing techniques to fit immersive displays, rather than considering new approaches for accessibility designed specifically for these increasingly relevant media experiences.This paper surveys a wide range of 360^o video players and examines the features they include for dealing with accessibility, such as Subtitles, Audio Description, Sign Language, User Interfaces and other interaction features, like voice control and support for multi-screen scenarios. These features have been chosen based on guidelines from standardization contributions, like in the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the International Communication Union (ITU), and from research contributions for making 360° video consumption experiences accessible. The in-depth analysis has been part of a research effort towards the development of a fully inclusive and accessible 360° video player. The paper concludes by discussing how the newly developed player has gone above and beyond the existing solutions and guidelines, by providing accessibility features that meet the expectations for a widely used immersive medium, like 360° video.