Guidance in Cinematic Virtual Reality-Taxonomy, Research Status and Challenges

Abstract

In Cinematic Virtual Reality (CVR), the viewer of an omnidirectional movie can freely choose the viewing direction when watching a movie. Therefore, traditional techniques in filmmaking for guiding the viewers’ attention cannot be adapted directly to CVR. Practices such as panning or changing the frame are no longer defined by the filmmaker; rather it is the viewer who decides where to look. In some stories, it is necessary to show certain details to the viewer, which should not be missed. At the same time, the freedom of the viewer to look around in the scene should not be destroyed. Therefore, techniques are needed which guide the attention of the spectator to visual information in the scene. Attention guiding also has the potential to improve the general viewing experience, since viewers will be less afraid to miss something when watching an omnidirectional movie where attention-guiding techniques have been applied. In recent years, there has been a lot of research about attention guiding in images, movies, virtual reality, augmented reality and also in CVR. We classify these methods and offer a taxonomy for attention-guiding methods. Discussing the different characteristics, we elaborate the advantages and disadvantages, give recommendations for use cases and apply the taxonomy to several examples of guiding methods.

Directing versus Attracting Attention: Exploring the Effectiveness of Central and Peripheral Cues in Panoramic Videos

“…Researchers have suggested that visual overt cues, which are this paper's focus, differ in effectiveness for guiding attention based on their position within the user's FOV [66]. Posner [59] famously described attention as a spotlight, as it is narrow and directed at fixated objects in the center of gaze.…”

“…Equally, some CVR-users are concerned about missing plot elements due to a lack of guidance [45,67]. In response to this, researchers have suggested that visual cues can be an effective way to guide users to Regions of Interest (ROIs) [66]. Popular techniques include stimulus-based luminance modulations * e-mail: anastasia.schmitz.18@alumni.ucl.ac.uk (i.e.…”

“…Few studies have investigated whether these cues encourage users to focus on ROIs and to encode related information into memory [65]. Indeed, attention models and taxonomies, which are largely based on research with desktop computers, suggest that only directional cues within users' central vision enhance attention for sustained amounts of time [31,35,66].…”

Auditory stimuli degrade visual performance in virtual reality

“…Further, instead of using a regular monitor, we conduct our experiments in an immersive VR setting. The reason for this is three-fold: First, VR offers a greater control over the conditions of the experiment, increasing reproducibility and repeatability; second, it allows for a more natural exploratory behavior of the subject, including walking around the scene, in contrast with previous approaches that required a fixed head position; and third, auditory-triggered visual performance degradation can find key applications in VR, where control of the user's attention is a fundamental challenge 20 . Moreover, it has been assumed in the literature that the visual performance degradation is caused by neural inhibitory interactions between the auditory and visual sensory pathways.…”

Social viewing in cinematic virtual reality: a design space for social movie applications

“…In CVR viewers see only a part of the omnidirectional movie on the display. Therefore, in some cases guiding methods are necessary so the viewer does not miss important details (Mateer 2017;Nielsen et al 2016;Rothe et al 2019). For this established filmmaking techniques can be used, for example sounds, lights and movements (Rothe and Hußmann 2018).…”