Abstract: The past decade has witnessed a significant increase in research efforts around Quality of Experience (QoE) which is generally referred to as a human-centric paradigm for Quality of a Service (QoS). As it puts the end user in the center stage, it may have various dimensions and one dimension aims at going beyond audio-visual promising advanced user experience through sensory effects. The motivation behind this work is that the consumption of multimedia content may stimulate also senses other than vision or hearing, e.g., olfaction, mechanoreception, or thermoception that shall lead to an enhanced, unique user experience, in this context referred to as sensory experience. In particular, we developed and standardized – within ISO/MPEG as part of the MPEG-V standard – a representation format for sensory effects that are attached to traditional multimedia resources such as audio, video, and image contents. Sensory effects (e.g., wind, lighting, explosion, heat, cold, scent) are rendered on special devices (e.g., fans, ambient lights, motion chair, air condition) in synchronization with the traditional multimedia resources with the intention to increase the users’ Quality of Experience (QoE). In particular, this talk provides a comprehensive introduction into the concept of sensory experience, its assessment in terms of the QoE, and related standardization and implementation efforts. Finally, we will highlight open issues and research challenges including future work.
Keywords: Quality of Experience, Sensory Experience, Subjective Quality Assessment, MPEG-V
CV: Christian Timmerer received his M.Sc. (Dipl.-Ing.) in January 2003 and his Ph.D. (Dr.techn.) in June 2006 (for research on the adaptation of scalable multimedia content in streaming and constraint environments) both from the Klagenfurt University. He joined the Klagenfurt University in 1999 and is currently a Assistant Professor (Ass.-Prof.) at the Department of Information Technology (ITEC) – Multimedia Communication Group. His research interests are transport of modern/rich media, multimedia adaptation, and QoS/QoE; he has published more than 60 papers (incl. book chapters and tutorials) in these areas. He was the general chair of WIAMIS2008, ISMW2009, EUMOB2009, AVSTP2P2010, and WoMAN2011. He organized a Special Session on Modern Media Transport at MMSys2011. Additionally, he is an editorial board member of the Encyclopedia of Multimedia, ACM/Springer International Journal on Multimedia Tools and Applications (MTAP), and associate editor for IEEE Computer Science Computing Now, a new online front end to all IEEE CS magazine which transitions the printed media to virtual adopting and applying Web 2.0 principles in practice. He is the inaugurating chair of the IEEE CS Special Technical Community on Social Networking (STCSN). Finally, he as an area editor for the Elsevier journal on Signal Processing: Image Communication and a key member of the Interest Group (IG) on Image and Video Coding as well as Quality of Experience of the IEEE Multimedia Communication Technical Committee. Dr. Timmerer has been actively participating in several EC-funded projects, notably the FP6-IST-DANAE (2004-2006), FP6-IST-ENTHRONE (2006-2008), FP7-ICT-P2P-Next (2008-2012), FP7-ICT-ALICANTE (2010-2013), COST-IC1003-Qualinet (2010-2014), and FP7-ICT-SocialSensor (2011-2014) projects. Finally, he participated in the work of ISO/MPEG for several years, notably as the head of the Austrian delegation, coordinator of several core experiments, co-chair of several ad-hoc groups, and as an editor for several standards for which he has been awarded with the ISO/IEC certificate of appreciation. Publications and MPEG contributions can be found under http://research.timmerer.com.
