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We present a new interactive playback method to enhance 360° viewing experiences. Our method automatically rotates the virtual camera of a 360° panoramic video (360° video) player during interactive viewing to guide the viewer through the most important regions of the video. With this method, the viewer can watch a 360° video with minimum efforts to find important events in a scene both in interactive (e.g., HMD) and less-interactive (e.g., PC and TV) viewing environments. To estimate the importance of each viewing direction, we combine spatial and temporal saliency with cluster-based weighting. A maximum backward cumulative importance volume (MBCIV) is then constructed by accumulating this importance in the video space. During playback, which uses a forward tracing scheme through the MBCIV, the initial optimal path is found based on the viewer’s viewing direction. A smooth path is then derived using penalized curve fitting. Finally, the virtual camera is rotated to follow the path. The experiments and user studies demonstrate that our method allows the viewer to effectively enjoy 360° videos with minimum interaction efforts, or even through a non-interactive display.

We present a new method to create realistic paint simulation, utilizing the characteristics of paint, such as fluidity, diffusion, and absorption. We treat the painting elements separately as pigment, binder, solvent, and paper. Adopting smoothed-particle hydrodynamics including a consideration of viscoelastic movement, we simulate the fluid motion of the paint and the solvent. To handle the diffusion of the pigment in the solvent, we utilize the mass transfer method. Following Fick's law, the concentration of pigment changes and each pigment particle is diffused to the neighborhood accordingly. As time elapses, the binder and the solvent are absorbed, and for the most part, the pigment remains on the paper. The Lucas–Washburn equation determines the distance of absorption. The examples show that our approach can effectively generate various types of painting. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.