What Are Others Looking at? Exploring 360° Videos on HMDs with Visual Cues about Other Viewers.

Viewing 360 degrees videos on a head-mounted display (HMD) can be an immersive experience. However, viewers must often be guided, as the freedom to rotate the view may make them miss things. We explore a unique, automatic approach to this problem with dynamic guidance methods called social indicators. They use the viewers' gaze data to recognize popular areas in 360 degrees videos, which are then visualized to subsequent viewers. We developed and evaluated two different social indicators in a 30-participant user study. Although the indicators show great potential in subtly guiding users and improving the experience, finding the balance between guidance and self-exploration is vital. Also, users had varying interest towards indicators that represented a larger audience but reported a clear desire to use the indicators with their friends. We also present guidelines for providing dynamic guidance for 360 degrees videos.