360 virtual tour videos show the surrounding view while traveling through an environment,
and they have become a popular way for people to experience remote spaces.
For example, students visiting prospective college campuses,
or families comparing vacation destinations.
Unfortunately, navigating such videos can be difficult.
Contemporary 360 video player interfaces rely on frame previews to facilitate navigation
but these previews contain visual distortion due to sphere-to-plane projection.
For example, if the users wants to find out what it looks like around the entrance to
the Louvre Museum in this video, it can be difficult using the conventional previews.
We propose supporting 360 virtual tour video navigation through continuous orthographic-perspective
projections of the environments along the camera route, and we call these projections
Route Tapestries.
We present a method to automatically create Route Tapestries from input videos using the
slit-scan imaging technique.
We first extract the camera trajectory and a sparse point cloud representation of the
environment from the video using simultaneous localization and mapping.
We assume that the scenes of interest on one side lie on a largely continuous boundary,
which we can estimate using the point cloud.
Finally, we take small slices of pixels from many video frames and join them together to
capture the full boundary.
We also built Tapestry player, a desktop 360 video player that uses Route Tapestries generated
from the video as its timeline previews.
The Tapestry Player offers two modes for video navigation.
The temporal mode navigation is linear in time.
Note that because the environments on the two sides are at different distances from
the camera, the two Tapestries move at different paces and move very slowly when the camera
stops.
For a smoother browsing experience, we introduce the spatial mode, which allows for navigation
that is approximately linear in space.
We compared Route Tapestries with two baseline interfaces, using a target seeking task.
One interface uses equirectangular frame previews and is modeled on the YouTube 360 video player.
The other interface uses two rows of normal field-of-view thumbnails as its previews.
This design is a discrete alternative to Route Tapestries.
Our results show that Route Tapestries allow users to locate targets 22% faster than with
YouTube-style equirectangular previews and reduce the failure rate by 75% compared to
the row-of-thumbnail previews.
Please see our paper for details.
Thanks you!