Headset attentional synchrony: tracking the gaze of viewers watching narrative virtual reality

Bender, Stuart Marshall

doi:10.1080/25741136.2018.1464743

Cited by 24 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 13 publications

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“…When 360-degree cameras became widely available, practitioners and researchers also explored and came up with guidelines for creators to capture engaging footage and effectively tell stories. Those guidelines include the principles of arranging story elements in the scene, the placement of the camera and characters, and the gestures and body language for human actors to use with the purpose of direct the viewer's attention in the immersive media without using non-diegetic objects (Pope et al, 2017;Syrett et al, 2017;Gödde et al, 2018;Bender, 2019;Tong et al, 2020). Later, as 360-degree video became more widely available and easily accessible for the general public, it was no longer a simple medium for short-term excitement.…”

Section: Interactive Cinematic Virtual Realitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Thus, viewers could develop a feeling of "being there" within the scenes and could freely choose the viewing direction (Rothe et al, 2019a). Researchers also started to notice in CVR, compared to traditional flat videos, that both the viewer's role and expectation of interaction had changed; viewers were no longer passive spectators like in cinemas, but characters inside the story scene, expecting a certain amount of agency within the virtual world (Syrett et al, 2017;Bender, 2019).…”

Section: Interactive Cinematic Virtual Realitymentioning

confidence: 99%

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Adaptive Playback Control: A Framework for Cinematic VR Creators to Embrace Viewer Interaction

Tong¹,

Lindeman²,

Regenbrecht³

2022

Front. Virtual Real.

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Content creators have been trying to produce engaging and enjoyable Cinematic Virtual Reality (CVR) experiences using immersive media such as 360-degree videos. However, a complete and flexible framework, like the filmmaking grammar toolbox for film directors, is missing for creators working on CVR, especially those working on CVR storytelling with viewer interactions. Researchers and creators widely acknowledge that a viewer-centered story design and a viewer’s intention to interact are two intrinsic characteristics of CVR storytelling. In this paper, we stand on that common ground and propose Adaptive Playback Control (APC) as a set of guidelines to assist content creators in making design decisions about the story structure and viewer interaction implementation during production. Instead of looking at everything CVR covers, we set constraints to focus only at cultural heritage oriented content using a guided-tour style. We further choose two vital elements for interactive CVR: the narrative progression (director vs. viewer control) and visibility of viewer interaction (implicit vs. explicit) as the main topics at this stage. We conducted a user study to evaluate four variants by combining these two elements, and measured the levels of engagement, enjoyment, usability, and memory performance. One of our findings is that there were no differences in the objective results. Combining objective data with observations of the participants’ behavior we provide guidelines as a starting point for the application of the APC framework. Creators need to choose if the viewer will have control over narrative progression and the visibility of interaction based on whether the purpose of a piece is to invoke emotional resonance or promote efficient transfer of knowledge. Also, creators need to consider the viewer’s natural tendency to explore and provide extra incentives to invoke exploratory behaviors in viewers when adding interactive elements. We recommend more viewer control for projects aiming at viewer’s participation and agency, but more director control for projects focusing on education and training. Explicit (vs. implicit) control will also yield higher levels of engagement and enjoyment if the viewer’s uncertainty of interaction consequences can be relieved.

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Section: Interactive Cinematic Virtual Realitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Interactive Cinematic Virtual Realitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Adaptive Playback Control: A Framework for Cinematic VR Creators to Embrace Viewer Interaction

Tong¹,

Lindeman²,

Regenbrecht³

2022

Front. Virtual Real.

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“…One of the commonly used methods to cope with this change is to define the viewer as either a spectator (not part of the story) or a character (either invisible or acknowledged) in the story. Bender et al [21] compared the effects of two camera positions in CVR, the character view and the immersive passive view. They looked at their effects on attention to important spots.…”

Section: Choosing the Viewer's Rolementioning

confidence: 99%

Viewer’s Role and Viewer Interaction in Cinematic Virtual Reality

2021

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Cinematic Virtual Reality (CVR) is a form of immersive storytelling widely used to create engaging and enjoyable experiences. However, issues related to the Narrative Paradox and Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) can negatively affect the user experience. In this paper, we review the literature about designing CVR content with the consideration of the viewer’s role in the story, the target scenario, and the level of viewer interaction, all aimed to resolve these issues. Based on our explorations, we propose a “Continuum of Interactivity” to explore appropriate spaces for creating CVR experiences to archive high levels of engagement and immersion. We also discuss two properties to consider when enabling interaction in CVR, the depth of impact and the visibility. We then propose the concept framework Adaptive Playback Control (APC), a machine-mediated narrative system with implicit user interaction and backstage authorial control. We focus on “swivel-chair” 360-degree video CVR with the aim of providing a framework of mediated CVR storytelling with interactivity. We target content creators who develop engaging CVR experiences for education, entertainment, and other applications without requiring professional knowledge in VR and immersive systems design.

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“…Visualizing viewer behavior in a 360 • video has been the subject of a number of recent papers. Bender [Bender 2018] investigated attentional synchrony or "how does the gaze of multiple viewers exhibit a high degree of clustering in space and time?". To do this the gaze data of 21 viewers was tracked across two narrative cinematic VR films.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…With this information in place, video streaming quality can be enhanced [Nasrabadi et al 2017;Ozcinar et al 2017b,a] or labor-intensive quality control can be automated in post-production [Croci et al 2017]. Finally, understanding visual attention also supports the storytelling process for 360 • video [Bender 2018;Pavel et al 2017;Sheikh et al 2016], e.g. through automatic prediction of visual attention of end-users directly during the editing process in post.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Director's cut

Knorr

Özçinar

Fearghail

et al. 2018

Proceedings of the 15th ACM SIGGRAPH European Conference on Visual Media Production

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Methods of storytelling in cinema have well established conventions that have been built over the course of its history and the development of the format. In 360 • film many of the techniques that have formed part of this cinematic language or visual narrative are not easily applied or are not applicable due to the nature of the format i.e. not contained the border of the screen. In this paper, we analyze how end-users view 360 • video in the presence of directional cues and evaluate if they are able to follow the actual story of narrative 360 • films. We first let filmmakers create an intended scan-path, the so called director's cut, by setting position markers in the equirectangular representation of the omnidirectional content for eight short 360 • films.

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Headset attentional synchrony: tracking the gaze of viewers watching narrative virtual reality

Cited by 24 publications

References 13 publications

Adaptive Playback Control: A Framework for Cinematic VR Creators to Embrace Viewer Interaction

Adaptive Playback Control: A Framework for Cinematic VR Creators to Embrace Viewer Interaction

Viewer’s Role and Viewer Interaction in Cinematic Virtual Reality

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