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YouTube's revealed the secret to making an engaging virtual reality video: put the best parts right in front of the audience so they don't have to move their heads.
Google's video vault offers that advice on the basis of heat maps it's created based on analysis of where VR viewers point their heads while wearing VR goggles. There's just such a heat map at the top of this story (or here for m.reg readers) and a bigger one here.
The many heat maps YouTube has made lead it to suggest that VR video creators "Focus on what's in front of you: The defining feature of a 360-degree video is that it allows you to freely look around in any direction, but surprisingly, people spent 75% of their time within the front 90 degrees of a video. So don't forget to spend significant time on what's in front of the viewer."
YouTube also advises that "for many of the most popular VR videos, people viewed more of the full 360-degree space with almost 20% of views actually being behind them." Which sounds to El Reg like VR viewers are either staring straight ahead, or looking over their shoulders with very little time being devoted to sideways glances.
A video channel wants people to treat VR like video. Hmmm. Perhaps the answer to their question is in the question: people should be considered "participants" instead of an "audience."
(Score: 4, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday June 19 2017, @05:29PM (1 child)
People seem to be acting very cynical and taking the wrong lesson here. The YouTube advice doesn't seem to be "treat VR like video" or "ignore what makes VR unique" (as someone else suggested here).
Read on to the next paragraph from TFA:
Seems to me this boils down to a simple realization: People pay more attention to stuff that's in front of them. That's basic human nature. If you're going to be successful at building VR, you can't ignore that.
So why aren't people looking around, aside from that fact that that's their default behavior anyway? Well, it could be unfamiliarity with new tech. In which case, you need to give people a reason to look around. But another simple reason may be that people just aren't that interested. You know how you get them interested? Show them something interesting -- WHERE THEY'RE LOOKING, i.e., in front of them. Then move focus beyond that gradually to get them to look around. Maybe place visual stimuli near that "focus area" and get them to move off to the side, drawing attention. There are lots of possibilities.
Seems the lesson here is that you need more engagement generally, and that starts with making sure people are interested where they're by default looking to begin with. Sounds like Google's saying, "If you fix that and get people engaged, maybe they'll care enough to look around." Which seems like a reasonable argument, though perhaps not the only possible strategy.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday June 20 2017, @05:59AM
One of those possibilities: place a hungry tiger behind them.
Like... for real! If they don't look behind, they don't deserve to live
(mind you, I'm not saying that if they do look behind, they are more worthy to live).
(grin)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford