Social eXtended Reality (XR) and Virtual Production: Toward New Engaging Immersive Experiences

Social eXtended Reality (XR) is poised to become a dominant medium for remote communication, social interaction, and collaboration in the near future.However, its potential can be significantly magnified by integrating additional technological enablers.On the one hand, the support for realistic and volumetric holographic representations of users, captured in real-time via affordable setups, will result in enhanced levels of quality of interaction, co-presence and trustworthiness compared to using synthetic avatar-based user representation formats.On the other hand, the availability of highquality multi-modal virtual production tools will enrich the immersion, interaction and storytelling possibilities, while it will allow providing such engaging services to large-scale audiences via 2D video distribution platforms.This paper presents a strategic vision toward achieving a modular and seamless integration between innovative Social XR, holographic communication, and virtual production tools to exploit all such potential advantages.In particular, it proposes a high-level architectural framework to cohesively integrate such technological enablers, accommodating novel features to meet newly derived requirements.Then, it outlines potential applicability scenarios and reports preliminary results as initial evidence of the full achievable potential.