360-Degree Photo-realistic VR Conferencing

VR experiences are becoming more social, but many social VR systems represent users as artificial avatars. For use cases such as VR conferencing, photo-realistic representations may be preferred. In this paper, we present ongoing research into social VR experiences with photo-realistic representations of participants and present a web-based social VR framework that extends current video conferencing capabilities with new VR functionalities. We explain the underlying design concepts of our framework and discuss user studies to evaluate the framework in three different scenarios. We show that people are able to use VR communication in real meeting situations and outline our future research to better understand the actual benefits and limitations of our approach, to fully understand the technological gaps that need to be bridged and to better understand the user experience.