360-degree videos introduce unique challenges to storytelling, especially if filmmakers want to draw the user’s attention to specific regions of the surrounding sphere to ensure the proper flow of narrative at any given time. For instance, at scene cuts, a user might lose track of a story if he/she looks towards a direction that prevents an intended region of interest (RoI) to appear in the viewport of the user’s head-mounted display (HMD). Because of that, new editing techniques for 360-degree videos are being investigated, and the use of dynamic (i.e., real-time) alignment of intended RoI across scene cuts is receiving growing attention. To support research on this topic, we introduce 360EAVP, an open source web-based application for streaming and visualization of 360-degree edited videos on HMDs. The 360EAVP is built on top of the VR DASH Tile Player, which is based on cube mapping projection, and adds new capabilities to handle dynamic video editing. Specifically, 360EAVP introduces 1) real-time track of a user’s viewport direction on the HMD; 2) support for dynamic editing via “snap-change” or “fade-rotation” effects; 3) visibility mapping of the user’s Field of View (FoV) with respect to the player’s cube mapping projection (for purposes of video tile requests during streaming); 4) incorporation of editing timing information into the operation of an ABR algorithm; 5) viewport prediction module based on linear regression or ridge regression models; and 6) video playback data collection and log module. To showcase the use of 360EAVP, we present results of a small-scale subjective experiment that aimed to evaluate the impact of the “snap-change” and “fade-rotation” editing techniques on user’s Quality of Experience (QoE), comfort, and head movement. Our findings indicate that these editing techniques do not compromise the overall QoE; in fact, in certain scenarios, an improvement is observed. In addition, some subjects significantly reduced their head movements with the editing techniques implemented.
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