Stereo Inverse Brightness Modulation for Guidance in Dynamic Panorama Videos in Virtual Reality

Abstract

The peak of virtual reality offers new exciting possibilities for the creation of media content but also poses new challenges. Some areas of interest might be overlooked because the visual content fills up a large portion of viewers' visual field. Moreover, this content is available in 360° around the viewer, yielding locations completely out of sight, making, for example, recall or storytelling in cinematic Virtual Reality (VR) quite difficult. In this paper, we present an evaluation of Stereo Inverse Brightness Modulation for effective and subtle guidance of participants' attention while navigating dynamic virtual environments. The used technique exploits the binocular rivalry effect from human stereo vision and was previously shown to be effective in static environments. Moreover, we propose an extension of the method for successful guidance towards target locations outside the initial visual field. We conduct three perceptual studies, using 13 distinct panorama videos and two VR systems (a VR head mounted display and a fully immersive dome projection system), to investigate (1) general applicability to dynamic environments, (2) stimulus parameter and VR system influence, and (3) effectiveness of the proposed extension for out-of-sight targets. Our results prove the applicability of the method to dynamic environments while maintaining its unobtrusive appearance.