Route Tapestries: Navigating 360 Virtual Tour Videos Using Slit-Scan Visualizations

Jiannan Li, Jiahe Lyu, Mauricio Sousa, Ravin Balakrishnan, Anthony Tang, and Tovi Grossman. (2021). Route Tapestries: Navigating 360 Virtual Tour Videos Using Slit-Scan Visualizations. In UIST 2021: Proceedings of the 34th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology. Acceptance: 95/367 - 25.9%.

Abstract

An increasingly popular way of experiencing remote places is by viewing 360 virtual tour videos, which show the surrounding view while traveling through an environment. However, finding particular locations in these videos can be difficult because current interfaces rely on distorted frame previews for navigation. To alleviate this usability issue, we propose Route Tapestries, continuous orthographic-perspective projection of scenes along camera routes. We first introduce an algorithm for automatically constructing Route Tapestries from a 360 video, inspired by the slit-scan photography technique. We then present a desktop video player interface using a Route Tapestry timeline for navigation. An online evaluation using a target-seeking task showed that Route Tapestries allowed users to locate targets 22% faster than with YouTube-style equirectangular previews and reduced the failure rate by 75% compared to a more conventional row-of-thumbnail strip preview. Our results highlight the value of reducing visual distortion and providing continuous visual contexts in previews for navigating 360 virtual tour videos.

Materials

PDF File (http://hcitang.org/papers/2021-uist2021-li-routetapestries.pdf)
URL (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0uAhUxJXgpc)
Video (http://hcitang.org/papers/2021-uist2021-li-routetapestries.mp4)
DOI (https://doi.org/10.1145/3472749.3474746)

BibTeX

@inproceedings{li2021routetapestries,
  author = {Li, Jiannan and Lyu, Jiahe and Sousa, Mauricio and Balakrishnan, Ravin and Tang, Anthony and Grossman, Tovi},
  booktitle = {UIST 2021: Proceedings of the 34th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology},
  title = {Route Tapestries: Navigating 360 Virtual Tour Videos Using Slit-Scan Visualizations},
  type = {conference},
  year = {2021},
  acceptance = {95/367 - 25.9%},
  pdfurl = {http://hcitang.org/papers/2021-uist2021-li-routetapestries.pdf},
  videourl = {http://hcitang.org/papers/2021-uist2021-li-routetapestries.mp4},
  url = {https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0uAhUxJXgpc},
  doi = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3472749.3474746}
}