Towards Understanding Scene Transition Techniques in Immersive 360 Movies and Cinematic Experiences

Abstract

Many researchers have studied methods of effective travel in virtual environments, but little work has considered scene transitions, which may be important for virtual reality experiences like immersive 360-degree movies. In this research, we designed and evaluated three different scene transition techniques (Teleportation, Animated Interpolation, and Pulsed Interpolation) in two environments. Our goal was to compare these techniques and their variations to find out which works the best in different situations. We designed an experiment to evaluate how different techniques influenced sickness and the ability to maintain spatial awareness of object locations in dynamic virtual environments. With this approach, we first assessed the impact of different speeds, visual adjustments, and movement types for each of the three transition types. Next, we conducted a study comparing the best variations of each of the three techniques. Our results showed that the Teleportation technique caused the least sickness and the Animated technique was best for maintaining spatial awareness.