Enhancing User Immersion in Virtual Reality by Integrating Collective Emotions through Audio-Visual Analysis
Authors: Corpataux Sam , Capallera Marine , Abou Khaled Omar , Mugellini Elena 
Published: June 2024

In the rapidly evolving field of virtual reality (VR), deep user immersion remains a major challenge for researchers and developers alike. Effectively integrating emotional cues into VR environments to enhance the user experience could be a key issue. This study introduces a positive advancement by presenting an innovative solution that combines audio and video analysis to detect and integrate collective emotion while watching 360° events. Our approach sets itself apart from previous work, which focused either on the visual or auditory aspect, by embracing a holistic perspective that more accurately mirrors the complexity of the human experience. We developed a machine-learning architecture that utilizes advanced models. Existing datasets have been enriched in a balanced way and are used to train various models, including a face extraction model, and emotion classification models based on spectrograms and audio features. Predictions from these analyses are merged to generate a value representative of crowd emotion valence using 360° videos as input. All models and the final architecture are assessed using accuracy, F1-score, precision and recall metrics. This proposed architecture enabled the creation of a nuanced representation of collective emotion, which is then used to generate targeted visual, auditory, and haptic stimuli. These stimuli are designed to enhance user engagement and immersion in VR by adding a layer of emotional interaction. The latter is assessed through user experience while watching 360° penalty event. The sound model architecture, which employs Random Forest and XGBoost models that feed into a meta-learner, achieves an accuracy of 98.71% on test set. Meanwhile, the model for classifying human facial emotions, tackling a challenging 7-class classification problem, achieves an accuracy of 56.15%. While this shows promising potential, incorporating additional visual elements such as object detection and scene analysis could further enrich the understanding of collective emotions and enhance the robustness of our model. The results of our study indicate that integrating these stimuli based on collective emotion recognition significantly increases user immersion. Tests with 10 participants demonstrate a notably pronounced improvement when haptic feedback is involved, highlighting the tactile dimension as an especially powerful channel for conveying and amplifying emotions in VR environments. This research has demonstrated that the integration of audio and visual analyses can significantly enhance the performance and robustness of crowd emotion detection models in VR environments. By synthesizing these two input modalities, we have been able to provide a more comprehensive understanding of collective emotions, which in turn has positively impacted the user’s immersion. These findings underscore the potential for more sophisticated and emotionally aware VR systems, suggesting that similar approaches could be beneficial in advancing the field and enriching the user experience across various applications.