Tuesday, June 6, 2017

QoMEX'17 Review: Down the Rabbit Hole - Immersive Experience

During QoMEX 2017 in Erfurt, Germany we had a special session entitled "Down the Rabbit Hole" which I have introduced here already. The papers of the special session will appear soon in IEEEXplore but together with my co-organizers of this special session -- Raimund Schatz and Judith Redi -- we also wanted to run the special session in a special way. Therefore, we asked authors to prepare concise and thought-provoking paper presentations (~15min incl. Q&A -- paper title, presenter, picture, key words below) to save some time for a panel discussion. Surprisingly, it worked very well and the special session turned out to be worthwhile and informative. In order to keep the audience connected and involved we posted a single slide of all panelists (i.e., paper presenters) which was shown all the time (see below).


The discussion was centered around the question "what is your understanding of a fully immersive experience" which revealed interesting aspects and finally resulted in the main challenge how to quantify immersive experience. In this context, Mr. T. (only those who've been at QoMEX and in this session know why he is called Mr. T. -- join us next time and we will explain you what's behind) raised an interesting idea to interpret the Turing test for immersive experience. That is, fully or truly immersive experience is achieved if a human is no longer aware that she/he actually interacts with cyber-physical systems. I think this statement sets the bar (high) but definitely worth to consider.

Finally, I'd like to thank all presenters/panelists for an amazing special session at QoMEX'17 but the journey is not yet over. I'll be attending ACM MMSys and IEEE ICME presenting/discussing various aspects of immersive experiences; also at the MPEG meeting in Torino which will be dedicated to standardization aspects of immersive experiences.

Also big big thanks to the conference organizers, the team around the general chair Alexander Raake
(TU Ilmenau, Germany), for hosting such a wonderful event! Hope seeing you all next year for QoMEX 2018.

Feel free to test/play around with Bitmovin solutions for VR/360-degree streaming and if you have a RICOH THETA S check out my blog post how to setup a live streaming session.

Come and join us on the journey down the rabbit hole which eventually will lead to wonderland.




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