Fog of Story: Design, Implementation and Evaluation of a Post-processing Technique to Guide Users’ Point of View in cinematic Virtual Reality (cVR) Experiences

Jose L. Soler-Dominguez, Carlos Gonzalez

2020

Abstract

The impact of Virtual Reality (VR) as a narrative medium is growing quickly. Opposite to traditional films, in cinematic VR (cVR) experiences, even when interactions are usually reduced to navigation, users are free to move the camera at their will and could miss relevant scenes while looking at unexpected places inside the virtual environment. Different visual cues have been developed to attract user’s attention and to make them focus on the main narrative stream. Those visual cues usually interfere with the actual storytelling, introducing alien elements and overloading graphically the scene. In this paper, we propose a visual postprocessing technique that applied to a VR camera will guide the user to look at where the relevant narrative events are expected to happen using dynamic visual layers. This technique, narratively aseptic, could be applied to different storytelling scenarios and is based on the Gaussian blur effect: the greater the angle between the user’s vision and the area of interest is, the more blurred the content will be displayed. Moreover, a visual guide is displayed to help the user to know at every moment the way to the area of interest. GPU shaders are used in order to not affect the performance. Additionally, metrics will be proposed in order to measure the effects of this technique on presence and agency, the most significant subjective parameters of User Experience in VR.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Soler-Dominguez J. and Gonzalez C. (2020). Fog of Story: Design, Implementation and Evaluation of a Post-processing Technique to Guide Users’ Point of View in cinematic Virtual Reality (cVR) Experiences. In Proceedings of the 15th International Joint Conference on Computer Vision, Imaging and Computer Graphics Theory and Applications (VISIGRAPP 2020) - Volume 1: GRAPP; ISBN 978-989-758-402-2, SciTePress, pages 327-333. DOI: 10.5220/0009087303270333

in Bibtex Style

@conference{grapp20,
author={Jose L. Soler-Dominguez and Carlos Gonzalez},
title={Fog of Story: Design, Implementation and Evaluation of a Post-processing Technique to Guide Users’ Point of View in cinematic Virtual Reality (cVR) Experiences},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 15th International Joint Conference on Computer Vision, Imaging and Computer Graphics Theory and Applications (VISIGRAPP 2020) - Volume 1: GRAPP},
year={2020},
pages={327-333},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0009087303270333},
isbn={978-989-758-402-2},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 15th International Joint Conference on Computer Vision, Imaging and Computer Graphics Theory and Applications (VISIGRAPP 2020) - Volume 1: GRAPP
TI - Fog of Story: Design, Implementation and Evaluation of a Post-processing Technique to Guide Users’ Point of View in cinematic Virtual Reality (cVR) Experiences
SN - 978-989-758-402-2
AU - Soler-Dominguez J.
AU - Gonzalez C.
PY - 2020
SP - 327
EP - 333
DO - 10.5220/0009087303270333
PB - SciTePress