ImAc: Enabling Immersive, Accessible and Personalized Media Experiences

The integration of immersive contents and consumption devices within the TV landscape brings new fascinating opportunities. However, the exploitation of these immersive TV services is still in its infancy and ground-breaking solutions need to be devised. A key challenge to be addressed is to enable truly inclusive experiences, regardless of the sensorial and cognitive capacities of the users, their age and language. In this context, ImAc project explores how accessibility services (subtitling, audio description and sign language) can be efficiently integrated with immersive media, such as omnidirectional and Virtual Reality (VR) contents, while keeping compatibility with current standards and technologies. This paper provides an overview of the project, by focusing on its background and motivation, the followed user-centered methodology and its key research objectives and challenges. The end-to-end system (from production to consumption) being specified, the envisioned scenarios and planned evaluations are also briefly described.