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

Viewing 360° 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° 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° videos.