Research conducted by Dr Alexandra Covaci, Lecturer in Digital Arts and Technology, at the School of Engineering and Digital Arts in collaboration with researchers from Brunel University was presented in a paper entitled: ‘360° Mulsemedia: A Way to Improve Subjective Quality of Experience in 360° Videos’ .
The project involved the design of a wearable 360 degree multi-sensory device which was used in an experiment with 48 participants who were exposed to three omnidirectional videos with varying degrees of content dynamism and encoding qualities.
Results showed that: i) irrespective of the video quality, the user’s enjoyment of the omnidirectional videos was higher when multi-sensory effects were employed; ii) whilst the improvement in user-perceived quality from HD to Full HD was evident and significant, the gain in the case of the transition from Full HD to 2.5K was marginal and deteriorates in the case of 4K video.
The findings have important implications in network resource allocation highlighting the fact that an important Quality of Service parameter encoding quality can be reduced in 360-degre multisensory multimedia to Full HD without any detrimental impact on the Quality of Experience. The results have been published in the Proceedings of the 27th ACM International Conference on Multimedia.