How to Reduce the Effort: Comfortable Watching Techniques for Cinematic Virtual Reality

When watching omnidirectional movies with Head-Mounted Displays, viewers can freely choose the direction of view, and thus the visible section of the movie. However, looking around all the time can be exhausting and having content in the full 360 degrees area can cause the fear to miss something. For making watching more comfortable, we implemented new methods and conducted three experiments: (1) exploring methods to inspect the full omnidirectional area by moving the head, but not the whole body; (2) comparing head, body and movie rotation and (3) studying how the reduction of the 360 degrees area influences the viewing experience. For (3), we compared the user behavior watching a full 360 degrees, a 225 degrees and a 180 degrees movie via HMD. The investigated techniques for inspecting the full 360 degrees area in a fixed sitting position (experiments 1 and 2) perform well and could replace the often-used swivel chair. Reducing the 360 degrees area (experiment 3), 225 degrees movies resulted in a better score than 180 degrees movies.