Holistic Quality Assessment of Mediated Immersive Multisensory Social Communication

Communication through modern immersive systems that afford the representation of a wide range of multisensory (visual, auditory, haptic, olfactory) social and ambient (environmental) affective cues can provide compelling experiences that approach face-to-face communication. The quality of a mediated social communication experience (QoE) can be defined as the degree to which it matches its real-life counterpart and is typically assessed through questionnaires. However, available questionnaires are typically extensive, targeted at specific systems, and do not address all relevant aspects of social presence. Here we propose a general holistic social presence QoE questionnaire (HSPQ), that uses a single item for each of the relevant processing levels in the human brain: sensory, emotional, and cognitive, behavioral, and reasoning. The HSPQ measures social presence through the senses of spatial presence (= telepresence + agency) in the mediated environment and social interaction (= interaction + engagement) with the other persons therein. Initial validation studies confirm the content and face validity of the HSPQ. In future studies we will test the stability, sensitivity, and convergent validity of the HSPQ.