Towards the Effects of Alignment Edits on the Quality of Experience of 360 Videos

TL;DR

This paper investigates how alignment edits, including a new fade-rotation method, affect viewer experience in 360 videos, showing that gradual alignment improves comfort and reduces head motion, enhancing streaming quality and storyline comprehension.

Contribution

It introduces a novel fade-rotation alignment edit and evaluates its impact on QoE factors through user studies, demonstrating its effectiveness over instant alignment.

Findings

Gradual alignment improves comfort across tested contents and speeds.

Alignment edits reduce head motion, with fade-rotation achieving 8% greater reduction.

Fade-rotation parameters are detailed for implementation.

Abstract

The optimization of viewers' quality of experience (QoE) in 360 videos faces two major roadblocks: inaccurate adaptive streaming and viewers missing the plot of a story. Alignment edit emerged as a promising mechanism to avoid both issues at once. Alignment edits act on the content, matching the users' viewport with a region of interest in the video content. As a consequence, viewers' attention is focused, reducing exploratory behavior and enabling the optimization of network resources; in addition, it allows for a precise selection of events to be shown to viewers, supporting viewers to follow the storyline. In this work, we investigate the effects of alignment edits on QoE by conducting two user studies. Specifically, we measured three QoE factors: presence, comfort, and overall QoE. We introduce a new alignment edit, named \textit{Fade-rotation}, based on a mechanism to reduce cybersickness in VR games. In the user studies, we tested four versions of fade-rotation and compared them with instant alignment. We observed from the results that gradual alignment achieves good levels of comfort for all contents and rotational speed tested, showing its validity. We observed a decrease in head motion after both alignment edits, with the gradual edit reaching a reduction in head speed of 8\% greater than that of instant alignment, confirming the usefulness of these edits for streaming video on-demand. Finally, parameters to implement \textit{Fade-rotation} are described.