Extended reality (XR) technologies are transforming domains like gaming, healthcare, and training, offering benefits such as enhanced safety, cost reduction, and immersive experiences. However, current XR systems often overlook accessibility for individuals with diverse abilities and remain unexplored in inclusive learning contexts. The Incluverso-5G project seeks to address this gap by leveraging XR to improve the lives of individuals with intellectual disabilities, including employment inclusion. This paper presents an immersive tool to support remote training for certified cooking courses, enabling users unable to attend in-person classes to access training and certification.The system includes an advanced 360-degree content viewer and a real-time immersive supervision tool, utilizing features like six degrees of freedom (6-DoF), color passthrough, and hand tracking for interactive learning. A four-step remote learning process—sensitization, instructional content, supervised practice, and certification—ensures accessibility and usability. The tool empowers individuals to acquire valuable skills and achieve professional certifications, demonstrating the potential of XR for inclusive training.

Cognitive training is a common therapeutic approach to improve the quality of life of individuals with intellectual disabilities, although conventional methods often show limited engagement and skill transfer. The use of eXtended Reality (XR) allows to develop immersive cognitive training, with evidence of improved motivation and engagement. In parallel, biosignals and behavioral metrics are increasingly used to assess user experience and cognitive state in immersive environments. This study presents a longitudinal evaluation of an immersive cognitive training application involving eight participants over eight months. Multiple data sources were collected, including eye tracking, electromyography and electrodermal activity, together with questionnaires and interviews to capture subjective experience. Preliminary results focus on gaze and interaction data. The number of fixations reflects task complexity, with more complex scenarios associated with increased exploratory behavior and a higher proportion of fixations on distracting elements. Interaction data from the most complex task indicate improved efficiency over time both before and during actions. Further analysis will explore these findings and incorporate the remaining physiological and behavioral data, together with the analysis of the interviews and questionnaires.

This paper presents one of the first studies on estimating group emotional states in immersive communication environments. We designed a two-phase experiment to assess group emotion recognition in both controlled and natural settings. In the forced-emotion phase, 32 participants mimicked predefined emotions in 2D and 360° video. In the natural-emotion phase, the OpenLAV dataset elicited stronger and more diverse affective responses than LIRIS-ACCEDE, indicating better suitability for triggering emotions. We also found that neutral states are mostly detected as slightly negative valence, suggesting a systematic bias in affect estimation. The study also found greater variability in valence than in arousal, potentially due to the professional setting of the experiment. Overall, the findings demonstrate the feasibility of coarse group emotion detection in 360° video showing a high correlation with participants’ self-perceptions. We believe this tool could be useful for making immersive communication more effective for audience monitoring, enhancing presentation skills, but also more inclusive for people with emotion understanding difficulties.

Despite remarkable advances, current Extended Reality (XR) applications are in their majority local and individual experiences. A plethora of interactive applications, such as teleconferencing, telesurgery, interconnection in new buildings project chain, cultural heritage, and museum contents communication, are well on their way to integrating immersive technologies. However, interconnected, and interactive XR, where participants can virtually interact across vast distances, remains a distant dream. In fact, three great barriers stand between current technology and remote immersive interactive life-like experiences, namely (i) content realism, (ii) motion-to-photon latency, and accurate (iii) human-centric quality assessment and control. Overcoming these barriers will require novel solutions at all elements of the end-to-end transmission chain. This workshop focuses on the challenges, applications, and major advancements in multimedia, networks, and end-user infrastructures to enable the next generation of interactive XR applications and services. The workshop proceedings can be found at: https://dl.acm.org/doi/proceedings/10.1145/3746269

Emerging fields like TeleOperated Driving (ToD) need to assess video quality for remote video transmission at different network available bitrates facing complexity challenges. This paper presents a novel dataset to contribute to the development of tailored quality metrics for ToD. Existing state-of-the-art AI detection algorithms and video quality metrics have been applied to a curated selection of sequences from existing self-driving video datasets, reencoded at different bitrates, thus generating a new dataset and the required tools to replicate the results. A correlation study of video quality and object detection metrics is also presented. Preliminary results show that state-of-the-art video quality metrics provide limited correlation with driving task performance, evaluated as degradation of detection of key objects and regions. The generated dataset and the framework to encode the video and obtain the measurements are publicly available at https://github.com/nachobfrupm/TOD_QualityVideoEncoding

The increasing deployment of immersive technologies is opening up opportunities in the field of behavioral therapies.In particular, the use of eXtended Reality technologies allows the development of therapies that require bringing users to a remote location without

The combination of eXtended Reality (XR) technologies with physiological signals offers innovative approaches to cognitive training for individuals with intellectual disabilities.This study presents a tool designed for cognitive training aimed at job integration through interactive and immersive environments.The tool was developed in collaboration with therapists from the Juan XXIII Foundation, an occupational center, and focuses on enhancing cognitive skills through serious games for job training.These games simulate realistic environments, such as a cafeteria and a supermarket, where users must complete various tasks.These tasks are designed to progressively increase in complexity as users advance, allowing them to improve their skills.Therapists can monitor and control the training sessions in real-time through an application, while users engage with the immersive scenarios.Additionally, the system incorporates non-invasive biosensors to track physiological data, such as heart rate, eye movement, etc. providing valuable insights into the

Extended reality has generated great interest in recent years, among other things, due to the potential it has to transmit non-verbal communication and offer solutions to current distancing problems. This work proposes a gamified experience of three use cases that meet real-life scenarios: teleassistance, guided route, and remote technical support. The objective is to solve each of the scenario tasks that involve collaboration between local and remote users through 360-degree video communication. Specifically, 2D and 3D objects hide symbols that local users must decipher with the help of remote users, who have the necessary information to do that. In this way, the technology (360-degree video communication) and additional tools included in the system are tested: a magnifying glass to offer remote users certain areas of the scene with higher quality, visualization of the hands with the headset to make the experience more realistic, and the cartoon avatars to increase perceived social presence during the interaction. This experience considers the needs of real hybrid meeting applications that have been gamified to test 360-degree video communication but apply to other XR technologies.

This paper evaluates a virtual teleportation system based on 360-degree video communication in a field study at a secondary school and a guided debate training session. Socioemotional aspects, including social presence and avatar representation, were assessed by eight teens. Key findings include a higher "wow" effect for those joining the immersive environment, and challenges with avatar interaction such as raising their hand. The system shows promise as an educational tool for debate training and student engagement.

This paper presents a comparison between three content-immersive methodologies to evaluate video quality: Absolute Category Rating (ACR) with unrepeated scenes, Single Stimulus Continuous Quality Evaluation (SSCQE), and Single Stimulus Discrete Quality Evaluation (SSDQE). Three tests were conducted with different participants assigned to each methodology to assess 360-degree video quality in an immersive communications context. Additionally, socioemotional aspects such as presence, attitude, or attention were measured for each condition. All three methodologies offer similar results in terms of video quality evaluation, and they all keep similar levels of social and spatial presence. Both SSCQE and SSDQE allow narrative and context while evaluating video quality, but SSDQE has less impact in participants' attention to the video content. These results suggest that it is possible to extend ITU-T P.919 with the support of long sequences with in-sequence SSDQE video quality evaluation, without significant impact on the socioemotional properties of the experience. This would result on a standard content-immersive method, methodology suitable for 360-degree video content, favoring the ecological validity of the subjective assessment tests.

This paper proposes a methodology to assess video quality, spatial and social presence, empathy, attitude, and attention in 360-degree videos for immersive communications. The methodology is validated in an experiment which simulates an immersive communication environment where participants attend three conversations of different genre (everyday conversation, educational, and discussion) and from actor and observer acquisition perspectives. We consider three experimental conditions: (A) visualizing and rating the perceptual quality of contents in a Head-Mounted Display (HMD), (B) visualizing the contents in an HMD, and (C) visualizing the contents in an HMD where participants can see their hands and take notes. In all conditions participants visualize the same 360-degree videos, designed and acquired in the context of international experiences. Fifty-four participants were evenly distributed among A, B, and C conditions taking into account their international experience backgrounds (working or studying in a foreign country), obtaining a balanced and diverse sample of participants. Finally, the annotated dataset, Student Experiences Around the World dataset (SEAW-dataset), obtained from the experiment is made publicly available for the research community.

Tele-education was already a solution for people who cannot attend lessons in person (such as inaccessibility in rural areas or illness issues). However, COVID has revealed problems in tele-education with current technology, causing adolescents and children to slow down their learning curves and experience problems of social distancing with their classmates. This paper presents a user study to validate an immersive communication system for tele-education purposes. This system streams in real time a class using 360-degree cameras, allowing remote students to explore the whole scene and improving the feeling of being in the classroom with their colleagues. Additionally, the prototype provides notifications to the remote students about events (such as a changes in the teacher’s presentation or classmates raising their hands) that occur outside their viewport to indicate in which direction they should move their heads to visualize them.

Recently an impressive development in immersive technologies, such as Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR) and 360${^\circ }$video, has been witnessed. However, methods for quality assessment have not been keeping up. This paper studies quality assessment of 360${^\circ }$video from the cross-lab tests (involving ten laboratories and more than 300 participants) carried out by the Immersive Media Group (IMG) of the Video Quality Experts Group (VQEG). These tests were addressed to assess and validate subjective evaluation methodologies for 360${^\circ }$video. Audiovisual quality, simulator sickness symptoms, and exploration behavior were evaluated with short (from 10 seconds to 30 seconds) 360${^\circ }$sequences. The following factors’ influences were also analyzed: assessment methodology, sequence duration, Head-Mounted Display (HMD) device, uniform and non-uniform coding degradations, and simulator sickness assessment methods. The obtained results have demonstrated the validity of Absolute Category Rating (ACR) and Degradation Category Rating (DCR) for subjective tests with 360${^\circ }$videos, the possibility of using 10-second videos (with or without audio) when addressing quality evaluation of coding artifacts, as well as any commercial HMD (satisfying minimum requirements). Also, more efficient methods than the long Simulator Sickness Questionnaire (SSQ) have been proposed to evaluate related symptoms with 360${^\circ }$videos. These results have been instrumental for the development of the ITU-T Recommendation P.919. Finally, the annotated dataset from the tests is made publicly available for the research community.

This work-in-progress presents a dataset of 360degree videos, called EVENT-CLASS, with associated characteristics in the context of tele-education. The sequences (video and audio) have been captured considering several environments, lighting conditions, acquisition perspectives, and cameras, enriching the dataset. EVENT-CLASS will be helpful for numerous applications related to tele-education, including quality assessment tests, and with the aim of improving the immersive experience of remote users thanks to the detection of relevant events that happen in the class. In this sense, this paper presents preliminary results of using transfer learning for person detection in 360degree scenes, based on Detectron2, and provides insights on the influence of applying it to equirectangular projection and over the viewport. Ongoing works will allow to include more videos and ground-truth annotations to the dataset.