ImmAcc

Description

The production and demand of VR360 content is increasingly growing, not only in the broadcast and entertainment industries, but in others like culture, tourism, or education. Current 360 players do not take into account that around 15% of the population has accessibility needs, and this will continue increasing because the worldwide population is growing older and governments are creating new regulations to make more contents accessible. 

ImmAcc is a web360 player that provides a new set of improved presentation modes and personalization for accessibility contents and user interaction for 360 video scenarios, an improvement from current players, which provide only limited support for caption. In particular, ImmAcc consists of a web player that provides a full VR360 experience or video and spatial audio, improved with an interactive and hyper-personalized presentation of access service content (subtitles/captions, audio description, and sign language), via accessible user interfaces that have been validated with users with accessibility needs.

The player also provides assistive technologies like magnification features, guiding methods, and voice control, and can be efficiently integrated in multi-screen scenarios. The key benefits are:

• Best-fitted and personalized presentation modes.
• Decoupled accessibility layer from the traditional media layer but seamless blending enabled.
• Allow the integration of immersive and accessibility content in current broadcast-related services.
• Evidenced-based set of requirements generated from user testing.

A key novel aspect is that the presentation of all these access services is provided via independent streams to the main audio and video, thus enabling an interactive personalization, and innovative presentation modes, like attaching visual elements to the field of view, to specific regions of the scene, or just re-position and re-size them dynamically as desired. This architecture allows for the content creation process to be cheaper, faster, and to offer high-quality results if it is integrated with professional writing tools and editors.

The ImmAcc player is published at the i2CAT Foundation’s GitHub with an open-source license, so we encourage all content creators and non-profit organizations to use it to foster the adoption of accessibility.

Currently, we are improving the ImmAcc technology to add more features and we are looking for software companies that provide solutions to the content creation market to integrate this architecture and features into their solution portfolio. For more information, please, contact [email protected].