Challenges of and Recommendations for Combining 6-DOF Spatial VR-Interaction with Spherical Videos
Alexander Wiebel, Sascha Keuchel, Magnus Eckenfels, Jan Drengner, Werner A. König · 2020
Virtual reality (VR) and spherical 360 degree videos are often used to provide users with impressions of locations or events which are hard to access or, in the case of events, are only held at special times.In this paper, we first describe two examples where users were immersed in spherical videos of real events and at the same time were allowed to interact with computer-generated spatial VR content.This combination can help to make users more interested and involved in the content of the videos and thus the events, but it also poses a number of challenges resulting from the two-dimensional nature of the videos contrasting the three-dimensional nature of the interaction and the six degrees of freedom (DOF) in viewing the VR content.The main part of this paper discusses and analyses the challenges arising from this combination, it introduces a classification of such combinations that readers can apply to their own application cases, and it provides recommendations for dealing with the different challenges where possible.The recommendations were evaluated in a public setting with over 1,000 users.