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 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

An experiment design: investigating VR locomotion & virtual object interaction mechanics

In this paper, we describe an experiment outline on investigating design and user experience related aspects of several virtual reality locomotion and virtual object interaction mechanics. These mechanics will be based on consumer hardware like a common game controllers, an infrared hand and finger tracking device, VR hand controllers and an omnidirectional treadmill. Corresponding related work will contextualize and motivate this research. The projected experimental study will be based on user test sessions with a specifically developed 1st person VR puzzle horror game, called Gooze. A hybrid approach of self-assessment, in-game parameter tracking and session observations will be proposed for the investigation. Statistical analysis methods will be suggested to evaluate results. Furthermore, this paper will give an overview of the game and elaborate on design, gameplay and user experience related insights of already conducted informal pre-studies with it

Drones, Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality Journalism: Mapping Their Role in Immersive News Content

Drones are shaping journalism in a variety of ways including in the production of immersive news content. This article identifies, describes and analyzes, or maps out, four areas in which drones are impacting immersive news content. These include: 1) enabling the possibility of providing aerial perspective for first-person perspective flight-based immersive journalism experiences; 2) providing geo-tagged audio and video for flight-based immersive news content; 3) providing the capacity for both volumetric and 360 video capture; and 4) generating novel content types or content based on data acquired from a broad range of sensors beyond the standard visible light captured via video cameras; these may be a central generator of unique experiential media content beyond visual flight-based news content

Work-In-Progress Paper: 360-degree immersive storytelling video to create empathetic response

Open days are organised by Universities to give potential students the opportunity to visit the University premises, talk to staff and student ambassadors and develop a sense of how it feels to study at a University something difficult to be conveyed via a prospectus. However, visiting open days requires investing time, travelling and can be expensive. The resent years there has been an increasing demand for open days to be delivered online. The social distancing measures imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic enforced this mode of delivery of open days as the only option. Many Universities created VR campuses to help students experience their campuses, but those fail to capture the actual vibe of a place and lack of empathetic response. New tools such as 360-degree immersive storytelling video (VR) and 3D interactive media present new opportunities for effectively delivering open days capturing not only a realistic representation of the place, but the actual feel of a place. This paper presents work-in-progress focusing on studying if 360-degree immersive storytelling video can create empathetic response. It achieves this by creating a 360-degree immersive storytelling video that effectively and realistically captures student life. This paper presents the project motivation, discusses the proposed research methodology, presents the research instruments and finishes with expected contributions to knowledge and future work

Engaging immersive video consumers: Challenges regarding 360-degree gamified video applications

360-degree videos is a new medium that has gained the attention of the research community imposing challenges for creating more interactive and engaging immersive experiences. The purpose of this study is to introduce a set of technical and design challenges for interactive, gamified 360-degree mixed reality applications that immerse and engage users. The development of gamified applications refers to the merely incorporation of game elements in the interaction design process to attract and engage the user through playful interaction with the virtual world. The study presents experiments with the incorporation of series of game elements such as time pressure challenges, badges and user levels, storytelling narrative and immediate visual feedback to the interaction design logic of a mixed reality mobile gaming application that runs in an environment composed of 360-degree video and 3D computer generated objects. In the present study, the architecture and overall process for creating such an application is being presented along with a list of design implications and constraints. The paper concludes with future directions and conclusions on improving the level of immersion and engagement of 360-degree video consumers

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