Sharing and navigating 360° videos and maps in sight surfers

Abstract

Video allows to capture and present events and scenarios with great authenticity, realism and emotional impact, and it is becoming a pervasive medium; while increasingly users are enjoying and technology is supporting, capturing, sharing and accessing videos shot from their perspectives and experiences. 360º video allows to capture the image all around towards more immersive experiences, while hypervideo supports structuring and navigation of video and related information, and technology for capturing 360º video and its trajectory are becoming more accessible to the users, allowing to support more powerful video user experiences.In this paper, we identify main challenges and describe the design and user evaluation of Sight Surfers, an interactive web application for the visualization and navigation of georeferenced 360º hypervideos, with the aim to potentiate ways to create and engage in novel forms of entertainment, culture and even art. Usability results were very encouraging and users enjoyed and would like to use Sight Surfers.

Interactive Visualizations of Video Tours in Space and Time

“…A user evaluation will aim at learning about the efficacy and preferences in each visualization and to provide directions for possible improvements, through a sustained progress. The focus will then be on developing effective interactive visualizations from a user perspective, that can be obtained or enriched by video processing techniques, for a faster and dynamic creation, following our work on MovieClouds (Gil et al 2012), and collected data about users sharing and access activity (Noronha et al 2012) (Ramalho & Chambel 2013). The ultimate goal is to provide users with visualizations that allow them to get overviews and insights about videos and the places where they were shot, and to access and watch them based on relevant spatio-temporal properties and enriched perspectives of their content.…”

“…We are extending our work on visualization of movies and videos by adding the spatial dimension to the temporal dimension, previously addressed through interactive visualizations that permit to explore and access videos and movies over their time of release (Jorge et al 2012), and the time inside their contents where their properties are weaved (Jorge & Chambel 2013). Our motivation is two folded: 1) we are further extending our work on MovieClouds (Gil et al 2012), an interactive web application based on the tag cloud paradigm that allows to explore and access movies through the information conveyed in their content, mainly in the audio and the subtitles, where most semantics is expressed, and for which we already enriched the support for the visual and temporal dimensions (Jorge et al 2012) (Jorge & Chambel 2013); and 2) we are extending the work on Sight Surfers (Noronha et al 2012) (Ramalho & Chambel 2013), an interactive web application for sharing, visualizing and navigating georeferenced 360º interactive user-generated videos, as hypervideos, including city tours or more extreme activities like kart racing. These can be experienced in increased immersion and isolation, or synchronized with a map while being played.…”

“…In Sight Surfers (Noronha et al 2012), designed and developed in our project, users can capture, publish, share and search 360º videos, along trajectories that can be viewed and navigated on a map, and synchronized with the video being watched at any time. A marker moves along the trajectory for the current location, and the user can click on any point in the trajectory to view the video from that location and time.…”

AR-Based Remote Command and Control Service: Self-Driving Vehicles Use Case

“…Noronha et al [5] propose a web-based application for Sight Surfing. The proposed system allows users to visualize and navigate through 360°hypervideos (i.e.…”