In Cinematic Virtual Reality (CVR), the viewer of an omnidirectional movie can freely choose the viewing direction when watching a movie. Therefore, traditional techniques in filmmaking for guiding the viewers’ attention cannot be adapted directly to CVR. Practices such as panning or changing the frame are no longer defined by the filmmaker; rather it is the viewer who decides where to look. In some stories, it is necessary to show certain details to the viewer, which should not be missed. At the same time, the freedom of the viewer to look around in the scene should not be destroyed. Therefore, techniques are needed which guide the attention of the spectator to visual information in the scene. Attention guiding also has the potential to improve the general viewing experience, since viewers will be less afraid to miss something when watching an omnidirectional movie where attention-guiding techniques have been applied. In recent years, there has been a lot of research about attention guiding in images, movies, virtual reality, augmented reality and also in CVR. We classify these methods and offer a taxonomy for attention-guiding methods. Discussing the different characteristics, we elaborate the advantages and disadvantages, give recommendations for use cases and apply the taxonomy to several examples of guiding methods.

Since watching movies is a social experience for most people, it is important to know how an application should be designed for enabling shared cinematic virtual reality (CVR) experiences via head-mounted displays (HMDs). Viewers can feel isolated when watching omnidirectional movies with HMDs. Even if they are watching the movie simultaneously, they do not automatically see the same field of view, since they can freely choose their viewing direction. Our goal is to explore interaction techniques to efficiently support social viewing and to improve social movie experiences in CVR. Based on the literature review and insights from earlier work, we identify seven challenges that need to be addressed: communication, field-of-view (FoV) awareness, togetherness, accessibility, interaction techniques, synchronization, and multiuser environments. We investigate four aspects (voice chat, sending emotion states, FoV indication, and video chat) to address some of the challenges and report the results of four user studies. Finally, we present and discuss a design space for CVR social movie applications and highlight directions for future work.

For watching omnidirectional movies via HMD, turning the head is the most relevant and natural input technique to choose the visible part of the movie. However, there is a need for additional interactivity in cinematic virtual reality (CVR), e.g. for navigating the movie, for nonlinear story lines or for communication with other viewers watching a movie together. The input device should not disturb the viewing experience and the viewer should not be primarily aware of it. We present a design space based on numerous methods in literature and our own experiences. As a result of the design space we describe interaction techniques which meet the challenges of cinematic virtual reality. For doing this, various dimensions of the design space will be combined. The most promising method, eye-based head gestures, is described in more detail and was implemented for CVR. The conducted user study will be analyzed in future work.