Vibe360+: An extended study on group-level deep emotional understanding in immersive communication

This paper presents one of the first studies on estimating group emotional states in immersive communication environments. We designed a two-phase experiment to assess group emotion recognition in both controlled and natural settings. In the forced-emotion phase, 32 participants mimicked predefined emotions in 2D and 360° video. In the natural-emotion phase, the OpenLAV dataset elicited stronger and more diverse affective responses than LIRIS-ACCEDE, indicating better suitability for triggering emotions. We also found that neutral states are mostly detected as slightly negative valence, suggesting a systematic bias in affect estimation. The study also found greater variability in valence than in arousal, potentially due to the professional setting of the experiment. Overall, the findings demonstrate the feasibility of coarse group emotion detection in 360° video showing a high correlation with participants’ self-perceptions. We believe this tool could be useful for making immersive communication more effective for audience monitoring, enhancing presentation skills, but also more inclusive for people with emotion understanding difficulties.