User Experience of Interactive Omnidirectional Video: Case Hugo Simberg VR

Virtual reality technology is gaining popularity and market saturation with new types of head- mounted display devices reaching the market in the recent years. With more conventional uses, such as industrial simulators for flight lessons, the newer technologies have found their way on the consumer market, being used at home for entertainment and gaming. An emerging way to create these types of applications is using omnidirectional video as the basis. These Interactive omnidirectional video applications can be developed comparatively quickly, while still offering some challenges in the development process. User Experience Design in the field of virtual reality has been gaining more foothold in the field of virtual reality application development. User experience offers a multitude of design frameworks and approaches to find the user needs and to ensure for the best user experience. While this design process is suitable for development on this field, the user experience and design implications regarding virtual reality and interactive omnidirectional remain quite limited. User Experience design methods were used in a development process for an interactive omnidirectional video application, Hugo Simberg VR, which allows the user to explore a museum and a cathedral virtually. This thesis discusses this undertaken design process, from the initial exploratory design phases to the iterative refining design phases, and the evaluation of the finished application. The results of the evaluation identified nine experiential dimensions in interactive omnidirectional video, of which six were perceived with positive valence, and three with negative valence. These findings show that these dimensions should be considered in the design of interactive omnidirectional videos

Design and evaluation of guiding methods for 360° videos

360° video is an emerging trend which is gaining popularity due to immersive nature. These videos can be watched on conventional displays as well as the Head Mounted displays (HMD). In contrast to the traditional 2D videos, in which entire video is displayed within the user’s field of view, 360° videos always have content that is outside the user’s field of view. Viewing 360° content on HMD gives the user an immersive feeling, the user feels like being in the recorded situation. This is a key feature of 360° videos. The content outside the current field of view can be viewed on HMD by turning head or body. However, there is always a possibility of getting disoriented as the content is present all around. Disorientation disrupts the user’s immersion and some interesting event or object can be missed. This problem can be solved by giving guidance to the user to navigate in a 360° video. Several studies have proposed solutions to the problem of missing the interesting content and getting disoriented. This thesis proposes a novel solution using a research through design approach to design a set of guiding methods. These guiding methods use visual and audio cues such as an arrow marker, a bull’s eye mark, and speech synthesizer audio to guide the user while navigating in a 360° video. A software prototype has been developed which uses different combinations of the designed guiding methods with different videos from YouTube. A novel concept of using 3D audio cues with treble and bass elements is introduced as audio guidance for navigation in a 360° video. The software prototype was tested with 22 users with a two-phase approach, where guiding methods were redesigned with changes suggested by users from the first phase and in the second phase the revised version was tested again with users. The thesis presents design recommendations for implementing guidance methods with focus on overall experience, usefulness and distraction. The choice of the guidance method depends on the content of the video. The guidance should be subtle, unobtrusive and non-repetitive. The audio guidance should be distinct from the content audio

Design methodology for 360-degree immersive video applications

360-degree immersive video applications for Head Mounted Display (HMD) devices offer great potential in providing engaging forms of experiential media solutions. Design challenges emerge though by this new kind of immersive media due to the 2D form of resources used for their construction, the lack of depth, the limited interaction, and the need to address the sense of presence. In addition, the use of Virtual Reality (VR) is related to cybersickness effects imposing further implications in moderate motion design tasks. This research project provides a systematic methodological approach in addressing those challenges and implications in 360-degree immersive video applications design. By studying and analysing methods and techniques efficiently used in the area of VR and Games design, a rigorous methodological design process is proposed. This process is introduced by the specification of the iVID (Immersive Video Interaction Design) framework. The efficiency of the iVID framework and the design methods and techniques it proposes is evaluated through two phases of user studies. Two different 360-degree immersive video prototypes have been created to serve the studies purposes. The analysis of the purposes of the studies ed to the definition of a set of design guidelines to be followed along with the iVID framework for designing 360-degree video-based experiences that are engaging and immersive