Extending the field of view: a human-centred design perspective on 360° TV

Abstract

Omnidirectional video (ODV) is a type of video that presents viewers with a new type of interactivity. It enables people to look around in a 360° view of the recorded dynamic scene as if they are controlling the camera themselves. ODV presents opportunities for new interactive television formats. The development of such new formats, however, is accompanied by challenges in terms of user experience and technical and creative development. In this article, we discuss issues and opportunities tied to televising ODV from a user perspective. These findings are the result of a human-centred design study. In this study, we introduced 20 potential users to ODV, as this was new to them. We gathered their feedback on the demonstration, and then encouraged them to envision suitable ODV-based enhancements of television genres. This article offers a discussion of both the methodology (including a form of laddering) applied in the study and the user research findings. We found that people see an added value in ODV under certain conditions (e.g. enabling exploration), but that there are also a number of bottlenecks such as the concern to miss key parts of a television programme while looking around.

Keywords:

• omnidirectional video
• television
• participatory design
• user research

Acknowledgements

This study was part of the xTV project. This project is co-funded by iMinds, a research institute founded by the Flemish Government, and project support of IWT for the companies participating in it. We thank our project partners,¹⁰ in particular, Philippe Bekaert (iMinds-EDM, UHasselt) who captured the ODV content used in this study and made the viewer¹¹ for showing ODV content available to us. We also acknowledge Vero Vanden Abeele for granting us access to the LadderUX software and David Geerts for sending us the list of genres deployed in the Geerts et al.’s study (2008).

Notes

1. To experience ODV for yourself, please consider the following example provided by our project partner iMinds-EDM (UHasselt): http://www.360video.org/eva/keizern.html. This is a publicly accessible version of the content shown to the participants in this study.

2. An example of 270° spherical projection environment can be viewed here: http://20203dmedia.wordpress.com/2011/11/17/270-degree-mobile-projection-environment/.

3. Our project partner CREW has and continues to use ODV material in their performances. Spectators wear a head-mounted display via which the ODV material is presented and thus become active participants in the performance. Their website containing samples of their work: http://www.crewonline.org/art/projects.

4. Sixteen of the 20 sessions involved face-to-face contacts. We also conducted 4 remote sessions following essentially the same procedure but via Skype (for interviewing) and Google Docs (for facilitating the post-survey and the vision exercise).

5. In fact, we are not the first to use laddering in a design and development context. Laddering was previously also adapted for product likeability evaluation (Zaman 2008, Vanden Abeele and Zaman 2009).

6. This online software tool, LadderUX – Laddering the user experience, is available on request. See: http://www.ladderux.org.

7. A vision that appears to be coming true as there are now relatively inexpensive ODV cameras for smartphones on the market, GoPano micro and Kogito Dot, which come with an online platform for sharing user-generated content.

8. Examples include BBC's Oceans 360 degree experience (http://www.bbc.co.uk/oceans/360/lemonsharks), CNN's special 360° coverage on the Haiti earthquake (http://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2010/01/world/haiti.360/index.html), and Net5’s reality show with 360° streaming (http://www.secretstory.nl). A few months ago, Channel 5 enabled viewers of the Gadget Show to have a dual-screen experience where they were able to synchronously explore the studio in 360° on their mobile or tablet (http://www.xs2theworld.com/en/our-work/channel-5).

9. In contrast with regular ODV, 360° hypervideo also contains links that users can click to access additional information such as related content elsewhere on the Web or other scenes in the video.

10. A complete description of the xTV project and a list of partners involved in it can be found here: http://www.ibbt.be/en/projects/overview-projects/p/detail/xtv-2.

11. This software tool for displaying ODV content, developed by Philippe Bekaert, iMinds-EDM is called iv-viewer.