
Do People View All 360°? - mdchaudhari
https://blog.vrtigo.io/do-people-view-all-360-f60b858059fe
======
PaulHoule
No suprise here.

Conventional storytelling in visual media is all about directing the viewer's
attention to where you want it.

Back in the 1990s I did some work with VRML and found that with the user
interfaces of the time the user would usually turn his back to what he was
supposed to see and then not be able to find it.

If you wanted to break the "looking ahead" pattern you'd want to design the
scene so that important events happen in different places; one thing you will
need is good audio cueing, and "stereoscopic" sound in headphones rendered by
HRTF won't be good enough -- you probably want 22.4 sound, but a properly
mixed 5.1 track and an optimal speaker system might be enough.

Also I have no idea how you light a 360 degree scene, both in the sense of
"everything looks good" and "you don't see the lights".

Even in outdoor scenes, Hollywood-quality work requires the use of lights,
reflectors and other tricks -- if you use real actors and don't light them
well they'll go to the union and complain.

There is a large precedent in video game storytelling but even there, critical
moments in the story are usually in cut scenes or rendered using "Visual
Novel" conventions.

~~~
freehunter
Half Life 2 was really good for telling the story while keeping the player in
the action. Even during scenes where characters were just talking to you, you
could play with the scenery and move around and pick things up. There'd be
several people talking in a room and the game would expect you to turn around
to face the person who is talking, then turn back around to see the other
person respond.

It was a natural step from HL1 as players became more comfortable navigating
3D game worlds. I'm wondering if they're waiting for that moment in VR before
choosing to make another story-heavy game like that.

~~~
KON_Air
Interactivity, yes. Action, no. Getting locked inside a room or waiting for a
progress blocker to be done with is hardly "keeping the action".

~~~
tsunamifury
I think you dont quite remember the context -- before Half Life 1's continuous
3D story telling, games would cut to video to move the story forward.

It was actually a revolutionary new story telling technique at the time that
did "keep the action going" because you could explore the room as the
characters talked.

~~~
KON_Air
I was pointing at HL2. As far as I can remember HL1 had like 2 or 3 lock in
sequences (besides the loooong intro), while HL2 stops everything whenever
someone talks and episodes have sequences that even lock the camera.

Yeah, HL1 was was revolutionary in that regard.

------
cgriswald
Watching video has been a passive activity since its inception (with some
modest exceptions). 360 video maintains all that passivity in its filmmaking,
but adds an unnecessary and inconvenient (even if cool) piece of
interactivity: turning your head. You can't even move around! It's cool, but
it's largely a gimmick for most videos as they are now. Maybe filmmakers will
develop new techniques for this technology, maybe not.

Games and other similar interactive content seem like a much better use of the
technology.

~~~
craftandhustle
As someone who had the opportunity to shoot a few of these last year [0], I
wholeheartedly agree. There's so much left wanting out of the experience
beyond the gimmick of the wraparound video. And, I'm not sure that films/docs
translate 1:1 into VR. As you mentioned, interactive content (and thus new
technology enabling this content) seems like a much better bet. You're already
starting to see it with frameworks like ForgeJS from GoPro. I'd love to see
the ability to export this type of content from the various engines (like
Unity) into YouTube/Facebook. The only reason I still feel it's still more
than a valid venue for content is the reach and access they've enabled for
regular, mobile users as opposed to Oculus/Vive/etc.

[0]
[http://robertobrambila.com/projects/gatesnotes-360vr](http://robertobrambila.com/projects/gatesnotes-360vr)

------
devmunchies
360 will not be the _majority_ of future VR content. 360 is mostly a gimmick.
yeah, sure, it is exciting to experience your first 360 video but the truth is
that when we are viewing content, there is an intended focal point and plot.

You get higher fidelity content given a smaller space as well. People will
choose the higher fidelity option where they are can conveniently view from
their couch without turning around. Its a chore. We like to "veg" and just
enjoy the movie/game.

Even the entire 180 sphere may be too much. People don't want to have to look
straight up or straight down. There will be a sweet spot or "sweet zone" as
more content starts to utilize VR devices.

~~~
Retric
Stage plays have some 'research' into this area. People want some separation
between the 'action' and where they are sitting so they don't have to move
their necks much. This is one of the reasons why the orchestra pit is where it
is, acoustics also plays a significant role.

~~~
hackuser
Interesting. My experience is hardly a representative sample, but almost all
theater I've seen recently has tried to 'break down the 4th wall' (i.e., the
invisible one between the actors and audience on a traditional stage). Some
examples:

* The play is set in a fancy nightclub, with half the audience sitting on the stage and the actors also moving around the rest of the audience.

* The play is set in a restaurant, and the servers are actors (unknown to the audience until the play starts and your waiter starts participating).

* The play is staged in a large room; the audience moves to different parts of the room, among the set.

* The stage is essentially a long, wide hallway between two long rows of the audience.

On a related note, I've seen many plays where the actors engage the audience
members directly, asking questions, having them participate; in one we were
the class for a pair of teachers. What I've seen has worked very well; it's
not corny or hackneyed, but smoothly integrates with and enhances the
performance.

I've seen it so much recently that it can't be coincidence; it must be a trend
in the theater.

~~~
stormbrew
There still tends to be a focal point, in my experience. Yeah they'll force
you to look somewhere other than the "stage" (which may, in some venues, be a
pretty amorphous thing but is still probably in one general area) to create or
break tension, but it's not a constant gawk-fest where you're looking all over
the place all the time.

Good theater doing this sort of thing uses it for emphasis. To force attention
to shift or change or to make it clear to you that "something has changed".

Likewise, audience participation is there to give the audience the sense of
being active participants, but still without demanding too much of them
(unless it's really active improv or something). It has particular power, I
think, in plays that are somewhat confessional in nature. Drawing the audience
in to the conspiracy/shame/excitement is powerful there. But if it's a
standard narrative I think it bogs things down a bit.

~~~
hackuser
> There still tends to be a focal point, in my experience

Agreed. This one and the others are all excellent points.

In the past I found these endeavors to be gimmicky, but recently it seems like
someone has found the winning formula. Despite being completely comfortable in
the theater, I still find that the recent attempts have eliminated a last bit
of reserve and distance in my mind.

I'd love to know what the new theory is; what is the model or idea that all
these productions are embracing? It can't be coincidence.

------
martin-adams
_We believe the reason why so few people turn around and stay long enough to
look behind them is due to stylistic choices made my filmmakers. Most videos
orient users at 0° along the y-axis and keep the action focused there
throughout the video_

Or they were sitting down?

~~~
mdchaudhari
Absolutely this can be a contributing factor. Something we are interested in
exploring in the future is "how" people are watching these videos. Are they
sitting down, lying down on a bed, turning around in a swivel chair, etc.

However, we did notice that the majority of videos with lots of action tend to
center their content at 0 degrees.

------
Filligree
One rather awesome video you can look at is Senza Peso. It's implemented as a
'game' (though it's completely on rails), and you need a VR headset of course,
but it's really well made.

Of course, most of the action still happens in front and to your sides. Not so
much behind. That seems like a reasonable compromise with viewer attention,
though.

[http://store.steampowered.com/app/496190/](http://store.steampowered.com/app/496190/)

There's a also a 2D opera version of the same concept, which you can find on
YouTube. The VR version basically puts you in the role of the movie's (main?
viewpoint?) character.

~~~
midgetjones
Nice! There's also a Squarepusher video that uses the same mechanic:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Olt-
ZtV_CE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Olt-ZtV_CE)

------
gumby
> We believe the reason why so few people turn around and stay long enough to
> look behind them is due to stylistic choices made my filmmakers.

I believe the reasons why so few people turn around and stay long enough to
look behind them are the same reasons why they don't do so in real life.

Sure, if there are distracting/scary noises behind you you turn around, but
otherwise you turn your body and concentrate your attention on something
specific. And within that, at the less macro scale you foveate on the specific
area of attention (hence their observation about the wider FoV of a
headset...which isn't completely well attested IMHO).

So the filmmakers are doing what people do and want.

------
dkonofalski
So, basically what they're saying is that 360 content creators aren't making
content that utilizes the full space well. People don't want to see a story
unfold in 360 degrees, especially if they're sitting.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but we recently created a 360 video of a
"Goat Yoga" session. Everyone involved in the yoga was in a circle around the
camera with all the goats in the middle. The people watching the video are
encouraged to stand at the beginning of the video or follow along with the
yoga instruction. There's no narrative and yet we have analytics that show
multiple people have viewed the video several times because they are the
center of the action and it doesn't matter where they look, they still get a
similar, but somehow custom, experience.

------
foldor
This doesn't really surprise me. It's a bit like sitting on a tour bus I bet.
Most of the interesting things are in the front and to the sides, so almost no
one will be turning around, or looking up. This doesn't mean the full 306
degrees shouldn't exist however, just that human nature is always more excited
about what's coming up rather than what's behind.

------
dweekly
It fascinated me to see the data that people average their gaze slightly
downward (expected, we are taller than most our prey), and slightly to the
right. Do we all have mild torticolis?

People also don't look up or behind them and especially don't look up and
behind which is why rides e.g. at Disney leave pretty much all the rigging out
in the open above and behind. Which makes the rides extra interesting if you
know where to look.

~~~
lotyrin
I wonder if it's an artifact of the resting sitting position when driving a
vehicle.

A dataset of where the resting head position is for people from locales which
drive on different sides of the road, and of people with differing hand-
dominance would be interesting.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Could equally be influenced by UI familiarity - MS Windows, KDE, Android, at
least, default to system tray and clock on the right. Mouse hand, or related
artefact of dominance of right-handedness ...

I'd expect a lot of VR users to be young gamers who don't yet drive?

------
madamelic
It drives me crazy to see 360* videos made like they are still flat.

The thing that bothers me the most is hosts that move... I don't want to move
my head to watch the show!

Graphics also bother me.

If I had my choice: Minimal on-screen graphics and if any, they need to be
duplicated and actually used in a 360* way ("Look behind you to see x") and no
hosts, just narration.

~~~
Klathmon
Personally I think that there needs to be a separate "layer" for UI elements
in 360* video encodings.

the whole thing of "show the title in 4 different places around you so you
won't miss it" seems like a poor hack, and it feels like being able to include
a separate "stream" which will be pinned to your view would alleviate a lot of
the problems.

If you want to get fancy you could allow some programmatic interaction between
the "view" and the "world" to give some kind of stylistic hint on where the
user should look, but i'm not really sure how that would work, and at what
point do you stop making a movie and start making a videogame?

~~~
madamelic
Yeah, that is the hard part.

I think producers have to rethink it from the ground-up rather than trying to
force a model for one format into a new format.

I've seen a few 360* videos that are well-made and were obviously made
specifically for 360 but others are just like "We got a 360 camera, then stood
in front of it and did the same thing."

------
tormeh
It's great for sports where the camera is attached to the athlete. For example
mountain biking, paragliding etc. Sure, that's a small niche, but 360 isn't
useless.

------
joshvm
Ockham's razor - perhaps people don't look behind them for two obvious
reasons: (1) People rarely consume movies standing up (2) since you're not
standing up, you'll probably be sitting down in which case craning your neck
to see the action all the time is painful. Especially for 'pure movies' where
there's no interaction with the scene, I think this is equally as likely as
decisions by the filmmakers (in unfamiliar territory).

When I've played with VR at friends' houses, most of the time we've played
sitting on the sofa or sat in computer chairs. There's a bit of craning, e.g.
when playing flying games, but often you only need to do a bit of left/right
head movement.

------
amelius
I'm wondering: when recording these movies, where do the director and film
crew hide? :)

~~~
ryandamm
For at least one scene filmed by Jaunt, the director was crouching in a trash
can. I think it was for "Kaiju Fury" but don't quote me on that.

Looked for a source to corroborate, but I heard it in conversation with Jaunt
people.

------
88e282102ae2e5b
This reminds me a lot of some of the first home movies that were made, where
people would just stand completely still in front of the camera, as they
didn't really understand what the new device was capable of.

------
busted
One my favorite 360 videos is this Charity Water short documentary.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlVIsVfWwS4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlVIsVfWwS4).
Specifically because it's very interesting and immersive to look around.

Another good one is the SNL Seinfeld monologue
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6HS9h4xFRww](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6HS9h4xFRww).
Because of the audience participation you crane your neck around to see who's
talking.

~~~
tangue
Charity water is really great, But I wasn't really convinced until I saw this
ad
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAldTk8dxPY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAldTk8dxPY)

------
throwaway2016a
Last 360 video I watched I turned around and there was nothing there (just
landscape and no action or narrative) so not surprised at all. Story tellers
just aren't accustomed to using the whole field.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
It would be interesting if there were an entirely separate scene playing out -
but stuff only happening in one place is a limit of physical bodies, surely.

------
loader
Something most people don't realise is these 360 videos are typically
Monoscopic. You don't get any feeling of depth because a lot of 360 cameras
are a single lens.

I much rather prefer 180 Steroscopic, these are videos that are two videos
either Side-by-Side or Over/Under. Then mapped to each eye.

180 fills enough space which is supported by these findings in the post but
give you a much better feeling of immersion.

~~~
wlesieutre
It's "easy" for monoscopic because the camera is just a point in the center,
but once you add in eye separation it needs to be in a physically different
position depending on what direction you're looking.

Conceivably Lytro's light field camera could give you stereostopic 360 video,
but the amount of data required for separate eye perspectives in every
direction is colossal. The camera apparently captures video at something like
300 GB/s.

[https://vimeo.com/161949709](https://vimeo.com/161949709)

------
drivingmenuts
Common-sense (WAGging) says that IRL, we don't use a full 360-degree view,
either. Maybe in a warzone, where it's a survival trait, but most days, we
focus on what's in front of us.

We also use subconscious cues to let us know important things are happening
outside of our FOV and forces us to change it. Has VR reached the point where
it can make those cues possible?

------
tmilard
Maybe, one should evoque the possible truth that, how can I say.... well
simply that 360° videos are just not needed for tha majority of users. I sure
may be wrong but I feel that in the brotwser/or/ youtube, 360° videos are
brotwsernkç noonsense.brotwsernk In virtual reamity helmet, I woukd bet a
dollar ororbut two for its success, but not my flat...

------
ebtalley
I would also propose that its partially not wanting to get the cord wrapped
around my neck.

------
ourcat
A lot of adult video using this sort of technology often only bothers with
180°. For obvious reasons. But it does also mean that the files (and video
frames) can be a lot smaller/better quality.

------
rootedbox
I'm surprised porn wasn't a genre type.. That would have been interesting.

------
randyrand
_Add a button to quickly do a 180_ so you don't have to crane your neck.

------
DonHopkins
I'm developing a 360 degree VR video player for JauntVR, and I've just
implemented an experimental "roll-to-yaw" interface based on using the "head
bobble" gesture [1] (roll) for turning around (yaw). ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

It seems to work ok, but I haven't yet done much user testing yet to see if it
makes you puke or gives you a sore neck. It's so obvious I wouldn't think of
patenting it, and I'd much rather share the idea and benefit from other
people's experience.

The jury is still out on whether it sucks or not, and you really have to try
it to know what it's like, but I'd appreciate feedback from anyone who's seen
or tried anything like that, wants to hack it up and try it themselves, or
even links to research, thought experiments or rules of thumb anyone has which
might apply.

It's very simple: roll your head to the right to yaw to the right, roll your
head to the left to yaw to the left. Of course there is a neutral "dead zone"
so you have to roll enough past the threshold to start turning, and the speed
you turn ramps up as you roll even more. The ramp can plateau at a maximum
speed to keep you from spinning too fast. The range of the dead zone and the
slope and plateau of the ramp are configurable parameters, which need to be
tuned.

Head roll or bobble isn't a common gesture in my culture, so I thought it
would be good to use for turning around, since you wouldn't do it accidentally
very often (once it's properly tuned), and it's easily reversible. However the
head bobble is more common and has meaning in Indian culture! [2] So I'd like
to hear from anyone who bobbles their head on a regular basis!

As well as tuning the ramp parameters, it is possible to filter and debounce
the gesture so you didn't turn around accidentally when you bobbled your head
expressively.

The roll-to-yaw interface requires more tuning and experimentation of course,
but since rolling your head is a much less common gesture than pitching up and
down and yawing left and right, it seems useful to use it for turning (yaw)
around.

I think it's important to have a way to turn your virtual body around without
actually turning your physical body, so you can still comfortably view the
entire 360 degrees of immersive video while sitting down or attached to the
computer by wires.

Here's one of my favorite papers that has some great ideas about pragmatic
issues which apply to all kinds of user interfaces: Buxton, W. (1983). Lexical
and Pragmatic Considerations of Input Structures. Computer Graphics, 17 (1),
31-37. [3]

"PRAGMATICS

In examining the two studies discussed above, one quickly recognizes that the
effect of the pragmatic level on the user interface, and therefore on the user
model, is given very little attention. Moran, for example, points out that the
physical component exists and that it is important, but does not discuss it
further. Foley and Van Dam bury these issues within the lexical level. Our
main thesis is that since the primary level of contact with an interactive
system is at the level of pragmatics, this level has one of the strongest
effects on the user's perception of the system. Consequently, the models which
we adopt in order to specify, design, implement, compare and evaluate
interactive systems must be sufficiently rich to capture and communicate the
system's properties at this level. This is clearly not the case with most
models, and this should be cause for concern. To illustrate this, let us
examine a few case studies which relate the effect of pragmatics to: 1)
pencil-and-paper tests of query languages 2) ease of use with respect to
action language grammars 3) device independence"

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head_bobble](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head_bobble)

[2]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uj56IPJOqWE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uj56IPJOqWE)

[3]
[http://www.billbuxton.com/lexical.html](http://www.billbuxton.com/lexical.html)

~~~
eyesee
I'm out of the industry now, but one more intuitive option we implemented was
to magnify pan rotations, such that a user only has to turn their head through
120º (tuneable) to turn a full 360º. Thus a seated user doesn't have to strain
their neck to get the full experience. Even in immersive VR, we aren't
especially bothered by the lack of 1:1 rotation.

~~~
DonHopkins
Wow, eyesee, what you did there looks cool at first glance! Thank you for
sharing your idea -- I will try it out and see how it works in different
situations.

------
facepalm
Maybe because it is difficult to rotate one's head for 180°...

------
yAnonymous
>VR analytics

Where people look in VR depends on the content. That's all there is to it.

That blog post is terrible advertising for your company, as it shows that you
will gladly create bullshit content around a trivial fact to boost sales.

~~~
riebschlager
I think you just described the content marketing strategy of every company
ever.

