Pano2Vid: Automatic Cinematography for Watching 360° Videos.

A 360° camera captures the entire visual world from its optical center, which provides exciting new ways to record and experience visual content by relieving restrictions on the field-of-view (FOV). Videographers no longer have to determine what to capture in the scene, and human viewers can freely explore the visual content. On the other hand, it also introduces new challenges for the video viewer. The most common interface for watching 360° videos is to display a small portion of the video as a normal field-of-view (NFOV) video captured by a virtual camera. The video viewer has to decide "where and what" to look at by controlling the direction of the virtual camera throughout the full duration of the video. For example, on YouTube, the human viewer has to control the virtual camera direction by dragging the video or clicking on the control panel. Because the viewer has no information about the content beyond the current FOV, it may be difficult to find interesting content and determine where to look in real time.