Shared Experiences in VR

In recent times, significant efforts have been devoted to providing Social VR solutions, in which users can socially interact and/or share certain experiences, mostly represented as avatars. In addition, multi-user VR games also enable remote players to share common goals within gamified experiences / missions. However, the available interaction and collaboration features in state-of-the-art contributions do not yet fully exploit the potential of Social VR for natural group interaction, true collaboration and sharing experiences with a global rich understanding and situational awareness. This project will deeply address this research scope, by analysing, developing and testing different tech enablers (e.g. engines, sync algorithms, coherence methods, interaction and collaboration features, etc.) to efficiently enable shared experiences between groups of remote users holo-ported in real-time within shared VR environments, thus resulting in accessibility, cohesion, sustainability and productivity benefits, in a variety of verticals. Examples of features to be enabled include, among others: shared navigation and viewing; guiding and assistive methods, global situational awareness, coordinated manipulation of elements, etc.