Missing the point

What Are Others Looking at? Exploring 360° Videos on HMDs with Visual Cues about Other Viewers

“…Many methods for guiding viewers in virtual environments (VEs) have been presented. A common context for this is cinematic virtual reality (CVR), wherein users view immersive 360 • stories using head-mounted displays [8,23,26,27]. Understandably, in filmmaking (and storytelling) it is imperative that viewers are looking in the right direction during key parts of the story.…”

“…Visual cues can be roughly divided into diegetic cues and nondiegetic cues [23,27]. Diegetic cues refer to cues that are within the virtual environment, as a natural part of it.…”

“…Nielsen et al [23] studied two guidance methods in a virtual environment: forced rotation, a non-diegetic cue where the user's virtual body would always face the action; and firefly, a diegetic cue where an animated 3D firefly would fly around the virtual environment directing the user's attention to the action. Although the differences between the two visualizations and a baseline condition (no guidance) were minimal, participants felt that the firefly helped them focus their attention better.…”

“…Similar to the forced rotation [23], other works have also investigated automatic panning [15,19]. While this approach removes the need for the viewer to rotate the view, it also serves fundamentally different use cases, and is not suitable for free viewing of 360 • content on HMDs.…”

“…This form of viewing can provide an immersive and enjoyable experience, and lead to a high sense of presence [1,3,7,17,21,24,35,36]. Current research commonly identifies the need to guide 360 • video viewers, as enabling viewers to choose their own viewpoint may result in them feeling lost or missing things [8,11,23,26,27,32,35,39]. While several methods to guide viewers have been presented, they have focused on limited scenarios and remained small in scale.…”