Joint evaluation of communication quality and user experience in an audio-visual virtual reality meeting

This paper presents a method for evaluating a communication situation in a multimodal multi-user virtual environment. In the evaluation both the quality of the communication and the user experience will be addressed. Twenty-four subjects participated in the experiment which was carried out in a virtual reality CAVE. Two different sound presentations were used (Diotic and Binaural) and two different video presentations using two levels of video quality. The mix between these two variables created four different sessions. In each session the subjects observed a virtual meeting. The subjects tried all sessions and rated their experience on different scales. The subjects also answered a questionnaire about the content of the meeting. The preliminary results from the experiment showed no differences between the subjects’ rating of the experience. Tendencies of relation between visual cues and subjects ability to detect the emotional state of the meeting members were shown.