CWI Researchers Present Work at the ACM International Conference on Interactive Media Experiences (IMX) 2024

As part of the TRANSMIXR work on the cultural heritage use case, the Distributed and Interactive Systems (DIS) group from CWI presented the work “Communication Challenges between Clients and Producers of Immersive Media Applications: can Social XR help?” at the ACM International Conference on Interactive Media Experiences (IMX), in Stockholm, Sweden, June 12-14. This paper explores new workflows and practices for improving the creation of diverse immersive storytelling experiences, in the cultural heritage domain.

Extended Reality (XR) has emerged as a transformative and immersive technology with versatile applications in content creation and consumption. As XR gains popularity, companies eager to adopt it often possess a surface-level understanding, investing significant resources without effectively addressing the genuine needs of end-users. This study explores the current workflows of XR production companies, and the potential of social XR in mitigating challenges throughout the XR production workflow. We present the outcomes of three respective focus group workshops conducted with three XR production companies and their experts (N=17). The results indicate that at every stage of the production, namely pre-production, production, post-production, and post-release, there are communication challenges between producers and clients, as well as different production and post-production specialists. We discuss various aspects of XR concerning the problem and propose novel opportunities offered by social XR to ameliorate those challenges, improving communication and making development more agile.