Watch, Press, and Catch - Impact of Divided Attention on Requirements of Audiovisual Quality

Many of today’s audiovisual application systems offer some kind of interactivity. Yet, quality assessments of these systems are often performed without taking into account the possible effects of divided attention caused by interaction or user task. We present a subjective assessment performed among 40 test subjects to investigate the impact of divided attention on the perception of audiovisual quality in interactive application systems. Test subjects were asked to rate the overall perceived audiovisual quality in an interactive 3D scene with varying degrees of interactive tasks to be performed by the subjects. As a result we found that the experienced overall quality did not vary with the degree of interaction. The results of our study make clear that in the case where interactivity is offered in an audiovisual application, it is not generally possible to technically lower the signal quality without perceptual effects.