A rapid prototyping tool to produce 360° video-based immersive experiences enhanced with virtual/multimedia elements

Telmo Adão, Luís Pádua, Miguel Fonseca, Luís Agrellos, Joaquim J. Sousa, Luís Magalhães, Emanuel Peres
2018 Procedia Computer Science  
While the popularity of virtual reality (VR) grows in a wide range of application contextse.g. entertainment, training, cultural heritage and medicine -, its economic impact is expected to reach around 15bn USD, by the year of 2020. Within VR field, 360º video has been sparking the interest of development and research communities. However, editing tools supporting 360º panoramas are usually expensive and/or demand programming skills and/or advanced user knowledge. Besides, application
more » ... to quickly and intuitively set up such 360º video-based VR environments complemented with diverse types of parameterizable virtual assets and multimedia elements are still hard to find. Thereby, this paper aims to propose a system specification to simply and rapidly configure immersive VR environments composed of surrounding 360º video spheres that can be complemented with parameterizable multimedia contentsnamely 3D models, text and spatial sound -, whose behavior can be either time-range or user-interaction dependent. Moreover, a preliminary prototype that follows a substantial part of the previously mentioned specification and implements the enhancement of 360º videos with time-range dependent virtual assets is presented. Preliminary tests evaluating usability and user satisfaction were also carried out with 30 participants, from which encouraging results were achieved.
doi:10.1016/j.procs.2018.10.062 fatcat:oqv3pjn5breadbbtqzwth522t4