Everyday photo-realistic social VR: communicate and collaborate with an enhanced co-presence and immersion

While Virtual Reality (VR) retains industry interest, the overall market adoption of VR is still slow. One problem in VR is the social isolation. Many applications are still single user driven and VR services that do allow the sharing of virtual experiences with others, mostly focus on representing users as artificial avatars. This might be good in some cases (e.g. gaming) but may be too restrictive for interactions where non-verbal communication is important, such as video conferencing, watching videos together, and remote collaboration. For such cases, the importance of photo-realistic VR is acknowledged within the industry and standardization bodies have begun to address the technology gaps in order to create such services. As an example, MPEG included a generic Social VR architecture into its recent OMAF specification. Also, 3GPP recently started new work on 360-degree VR conferencing and is studying the relevance of many more VR (and AR) communication use cases and technologies to enable them in 5G. In this paper, we report on our recent experiments allowing people to interact, communicate and collaborate with each other as if they were in the same place, while sharing a virtual environment. Our VR conferencing platform is modular, web-based and allows for rapid creation of photo-realistic shared experiences. We evaluated our platform with 313 users in six experiences, for both 360-degree video and 3D volumetric VR. We describe the conditions of each experience, reflect on participant survey results, and sketch a roadmap for the future standardization of social VR services that address, both shared photo-realistic VR experiences in 360-degree, and volumetric video