Transitioning360: Content-aware NFoV Virtual Camera Paths for 360° Video Playback

Miao Wang1,2    Yi-Jun Li1    Wen-Xuan Zhang1    Christian Richardt3    Shi-Min Hu4

1 Beihang University       2 Peng Cheng Laboratory       3 University of Bath       4 Tsinghua University

International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR) 2020

Abstract

Despite the increasing number of head-mounted displays, many 360° VR videos are still being viewed by users on existing 2D displays. To this end, a subset of the 360° video content is often shown inside a manually or semi-automatically selected normal-field-of-view (NFoV) window. However, during the playback, simply watching an NFoV video can easily miss concurrent off-screen content. We present Transitioning360, a tool for 360° video navigation and playback on 2D displays by transitioning between multiple NFoV views that track potentially interesting targets or events. Our method computes virtual NFoV camera paths considering content awareness and diversity in an offline preprocess. During playback, the user can watch any NFoV view corresponding to a precomputed camera path. Moreover, our interface shows other candidate views, providing a sense of concurrent events. At any time, the user can transition to other candidate views for fast navigation and exploration. Experimental results including a user study demonstrate that the viewing experience using our method is more enjoyable and convenient than previous methods.

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Bibtex

@inproceedings{Transitioning360,
  author    = {Miao Wang and Yi-Jun Li and Wen-Xuan Zhang and Christian Richardt and Shi-Min Hu},
  title     = {{Transitioning360}: Content-aware {NFoV} Virtual Camera Paths for 360° Video Playback},
  booktitle = {International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR)},
  year      = {2020},
  url       = {https://richardt.name/transitioning360/},
}