Content Format and Quality of Experience in Virtual Reality
This work addresses content production challenges for VR developers, but it is incremental as it compares existing formats without introducing new methods.
The paper investigated three virtual reality content formats—360 stereoscopic video, 3D environments with video billboards, and full 3D scenes—and found that a hybrid approach combining video and 3D content provided the best quality of experience in a user study with 24 participants.
In this paper, we investigate three forms of virtual reality content production and consumption. Namely, 360 stereoscopic video, the combination of a 3D environment with a video billboard for dynamic elements, and a full 3D rendered scene. On one hand, video based techniques facilitate the acquisition of content, but they can limit the experience of the user since the content is captured from a fixed point of view. On the other hand, 3D content allows for point of view translation, but real-time photorealistic rendering is not trivial and comes at high production and processing costs. We also compare the two extremes with an approach that combines dynamic video elements with a 3D virtual environment. We discuss the advantages and disadvantages of these systems, and present the result of a user study with 24 participants. In the study, we evaluated the quality of experience, including presence, simulation sickness and participants' assessment of content quality, of three versions of a cinematic segment with two actors. We found that, in this context, mixing video and 3D content produced the best experience.