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This article aims to define the main principles of editing concepts in the context of spherical audiovisual content (360 videos); identify the reasons for the formation of these principles; and analyse their impact on the viewer. Research methodology. To examine the topic, the author uses a case-study method, which relies on the studying, analysis, and generalisation of specific examples. The author also applies a comparative approach to compare editing techniques for the spherical and non-spherical audiovisual content. The scientific novelty lies in the editing of spherical video being considered as a separate, unique system with its own laws and rules that have formed as a result of the development of devices for the recording, processing, and playback of this video format, and most importantly - as a response to the growing audience demand for such spectacle. Conclusions. Spherical video is a new visual form that is dynamically evolving and transforming, thus, developing its own system of editing concepts. This system uses the same ideas and tools as classical cinematography but applies them differently because of the immersiveness of its environment. The viewer's freedom in interacting with content does not equate to the loss of control for the author over the work; instead, it transforms the tools with which the author operates to guide the audience through the narrative. As a result, this medium influences the cinematic language - the visual language of the 21st century, expanding its artistic boundaries. The author of this article believes that the features of editing concepts in spherical audiovisual content represent a promising topic for study and practical research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Predicting where users will look inside head-mounted displays (HMDs) and fetching only the relevant content is an effective approach for streaming bulky 360 videos over bandwidth-constrained networks. Despite previous efforts, anticipating users' fast and sudden head movements is still difficult because there is a lack of clear understanding of the unique visual attention in 360 videos that dictates the users' head movement in HMDs. This in turn reduces the effectiveness of streaming systems and degrades the users' Quality of Experience. To address this issue, we propose to extract salient cues unique in the 360 video content to capture the attentive behavior of HMD users. Empowered by the newly discovered saliency features, we devise a head-movement prediction algorithm to accurately predict users' head orientations in the near future. A 360 video streaming framework that takes full advantage of the head movement predictor is proposed to enhance the quality of delivered 360 videos. Practical trace-driven results show that the proposed saliency-based 360 video streaming system reduces the stall duration by 65% and the stall count by 46%, while saving 31% more bandwidth than state-of-the-art approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the recent upsurge of interest in passengering, there are no accounts on how backseat passengering links to experimental film and 360 video or how it responds to the broader relationship between automobilities, the organization of car travel and on-screen storytelling. To fill this gap, I follow up on the profiling of the passenger as a distinctive subject and object of infrastructures of mobility to discuss the backseat passenger's experience, seen as both a socially engaged and embodied practice, in four stylistically distinct works, Larry Gottheim's Harmonica, Lluis Escartín's Mohave Cruising, Ken Jacobs' Berkeley to San Francisco, and ASMR Driving at night: Back seat view. While Harmonica, Mohave Cruising and Berkeley to San Francisco are selective, self-aware experiments, which play out in various forms, ASMR is an authorless 360 drive video that lacks much aesthetic value and continues the long-established culture of scenic road and auto-tourism, turning on-site visitors into virtual tourists. Although each work approaches passengering visualities differently through exhibiting forward, side, parallax and 3 D views, they all articulate a multi-sensorial experience of driving and offer a relatively novel take on the practices of automobility through shifting the perspective of the driver and frontseat passenger to the backseat view. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

360 video is considered an "empathy machine," in part because it places audiences in the perspective of the other. Despite its popularity, its influence on empathy is not fully understood. Two possible mechanisms driving empathy within 360 video are social presence (sense of being with others) and interactivity (degree of control over media content). To elucidate how 360 videos can encourage empathic outcomes through these factors, a 2 (social presence: high/low) × 2 (interactivity: high/low) between-subjects experiment (N = 110) was conducted testing 360 videos about Alaskan climate change refugees. Results demonstrate that social presence contributes to prosocial behaviors (donations) through empathic concern, an effect augmented by interactivity. Unexpectedly, the social presence manipulation also contributed to greater perceived interactivity. Collectively, results are promising and elucidate the role of social presence and interactivity in immersive storytelling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Authoring 360 multisensory videos is a true challenge as the authoring tools available are scarce and restrictive. In this paper, we propose an authoring tool with three different authoring interfaces (desktop, immersive, and tangible interface) for creating multisensory 360 videos with the advantage of having a live preview of the multisensory content that is being produced. An evaluation of the three authoring tools having into account gender, system usability, presence, satisfaction, and effectiveness (time to accomplish tasks, number of errors, and number of help requests) is presented. The sample consisted of 48 participants (24 males and 24 females) evenly distributed between the different interfaces (8 males and 8 females for each interface). The results revealed that gender does not have any impact in the studied interfaces regarding all the dependent variables; immersive and tangible interfaces have higher levels of satisfaction than desktop interface as it allows more interaction freedom, and desktop interface have the lowest time to accomplish the tasks because people are more familiar with keyboard and mouse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates adaptive streaming of one or multiple tiled 360 videos from a multi-antenna base station (BS) to one or multiple single-antenna users, respectively, in a multi-carrier wireless system. We aim to maximize the video quality while keeping rebuffering time small via encoding rate adaptation at each group of pictures (GOP) and transmission adaptation at each (transmission) slot. To capture the impact of field-of-view (FoV) prediction, we consider three cases of FoV viewing probability distributions, i.e., perfect, imperfect, and unknown FoV viewing probability distributions, and use the average total utility, worst average total utility, and worst total utility as the respective performance metrics. In the single-user scenario, we optimize the encoding rates of the tiles, encoding rates of the FoVs, and transmission beamforming vectors for all subcarriers to maximize the total utility in each case. In the multi-user scenario, we adopt rate splitting with successive decoding and optimize the encoding rates of the tiles, encoding rates of the FoVs, rates of the common and private messages, and transmission beamforming vectors for all subcarriers to maximize the total utility in each case. Then, we separate the challenging optimization problem into multiple tractable problems in each scenario. In the single-user scenario, we obtain a globally optimal solution of each problem using transformation techniques and the Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) conditions. In the multi-user scenario, we obtain a KKT point of each problem using the concave-convex procedure (CCCP). Finally, numerical results demonstrate that the proposed solutions achieve notable gains in quality, quality variation, and rebuffering time over existing schemes in all three cases. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work revealing the impact of FoV prediction on the performance of adaptive streaming of tiled 360 videos. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of video is commonplace for professional preparation in education and other fields. Research has provided evidence that the use of video in these contexts can lead to increased noticing and reflection. However, educators now have access to evolving forms of video such as 360 video. The purpose of this study was to adapt and validate an instrument for assessing immersive 360 video use in an undergraduate preservice teacher university training program. Data provided evidence of the validity of the Extended Reality Presence Scale (XRPS) for 360 video research in preservice teacher professional development. Moreover, evidence from the study suggests that those with higher feelings of presence are less likely to jump around (or twitch) while watching 360 videos. The main implications are that: a) the XRPS is a validated and reliable instrument and b) more research is needed to examine the presence and practices for in‐service and preservice teachers while watching 360 video. Practitioners notesWhat is already known about this topic? Instructional videos are widely used in preservice teacher training.360 videos show promise for improving preservice teacher professional development in terms of immersion and presence.What this paper adds? An instrument for assessing 360 video teacher presence is presented (XRPS), targeting a current gap in the literature.Data provided evidence of the validity of the tool for future 360 video research and integration.Implications for practice and/or policy Practitioners can use XRPS for assessing preservice teachers' experiences in immersive environments and evaluating 360 videos.Higher feelings of presence are associated with more focused viewpoints. Therefore, practitioners should support and facilitate this watching behavior.Higher scores of presence are associated with a perceived sense of agency and emotional attachment. Therefore, 360 videos should include design elements promoting these feelings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Learners are increasingly experiencing 360° videos across educational environments, including within spherical video virtual reality (SVVR) environments. Although 360° videos may offer an immersive experience, it is not yet clear if they offer any broadly generalizable learning benefits compared to other conditions. In this study, we conducted a three-level meta-analysis to examine the effects of 360° videos on learning compared to other learning conditions. Results show no significant benefit nor detriment from learning with 360° videos. We also found few factors which significantly moderated the effect. We conclude that if supporting cognitive learning outcomes is the goal, as opposed to affective or perceptive outcomes, there are likely other technologies that may be more resource efficient for supporting learning. Additional implications for research and practice are discussed. • Spherical video virtual reality (SVVR) and 360° video are growing in popularity • We conducted a three-level meta-analysis in relation to learning outcomes • We found no significant benefit or detriment from using SVVR or 360° video [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

360-degree video is an immersive technology used in research across academic disciplines. This paper provides the first comprehensive review on the use of 360-degree video for virtual place-based research, highlighting its use in experimental, experiential, and environmental observation studies. Five key research domains for 360-degree video are described: tourism and cultural heritage; built environment and land use; natural environment; health and wellbeing; and transportation and safety. 360-degree video offers considerable advantages compared to unidirectional video, computer-generated virtual reality, and map-based geographic representation. Benefits include ease of use, low-cost, interactivity, sense of immersive realism, remote accessibility, and the ability to capture and analyze places in a fully panoramic field of view. Limitations include additional costs associated with virtual reality viewing technologies, simulation sickness and discomfort, and viewer distraction due to the technology's novelty and immersive affordances. This paper also outlines a future research agenda, including the possibility of moving beyond the 'testing and trialling' of 360-degree video since it provides novel research opportunities distinct from either 'real' experience or conventional forms of visual and spatial representation. Overall, this paper provides detailed evidence for researchers interested in using 360-degree video for virtual research on built, social, and natural environments and human-environment interactions. • 360-degree video is a novel technology for virtual place-based research. • This review represents the first synthesis of evidence across research domains. • Rapid growth is attributed to increasing availability of cameras and VR technology. • This review identifies 5 key thematic research areas for 360-degree video. • Advantages over video and other forms of geographic and representation are documented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although it is a relatively new innovation, 360 videos have gained commercial and public popularity. Given their novelty, there is a relative dearth of studies on their effectiveness. Most of the existing research is published as technical articles dealing with standards and specifications, as theoretical pieces promoting the potential value, or as descriptive experiences and resulting factors. Such work is arguably needed, but the field lacks deep research basis for justifying and clarifying the implementation of 360 video into practice. This article reports on a study exploring 360 videos for improving elementary mathematics teacher education. The results of the empirical study show improved immersion, presence, and video evaluation from using 360 video. Additionally, participants who viewed the videos on virtual reality headsets demonstrated increased attention to mathematical strategies in the context of teaching, demonstrating the potential usefulness of 360 headsets for perceptual capacity and teacher noticing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Newspapers have been affected by a progressive loss of readership over the last decade, especially among those under 24 years old. This group continues to stay informed about topics of their interest, but through social networks. For this reason, the press has incorporated a playful, immersive, and participatory journalism based on technologies such as virtual reality or 360 videos. Through quantitative and qualitative analysis of data obtained from eye tracking, and by subsequently performing semi-structured interviews, this research verifies the attention paid by Spanish and Portuguese university students to violent, immersive, journalistic content. Students' understanding and awareness of this informative material with violent events is analyzed. The capability of immersive journalism to capture the attention of the public under 24 years old and to raise awareness about social problems based on visualization of violent content is highlighted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Virtual reality (VR) provides users extraordinary viewing experience and draws more and more attentions from both industry and academia. In this paper, we propose JET: Joint source and channel coding for Error resilient virtual reality video wireless Transmission , where we jointly investigate how to conquer the problem of source video’s huge size, how to efficiently satisfy a user’s view switch request and how to handle packet loss. Specifically, we first divide a VR video into smaller video tiles. Upon a user’s view switch request, the tiles corresponding to the part that the user is requesting, referred to as the field of view (FoV), and the part that the user may switch to before new video can be received, are delivered over a wireless network. We consider unequal error protection (UEP) for FoV and the rest part and formulate the inherent error resilient VR video transmission problem into a joint source and channel coding problem. In particular, we optimize the tile partition, quantization parameter and Forward Error Correction (FEC) packet allocation to maximize a user’s received video quality. We also propose a low-complexity heuristic algorithm to solve this optimization problem. Extensive simulations are conducted and simulation results verify the superior performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Virtual reality (VR) has recently been popularized as the "ultimate empathy machine," and yet the science behind the effects of VR on empathy is scarce. In this media-comparison study, we assessed the impact of VR upon physiological and subjective indicators of empathy. Furthermore, we investigated the role of social presence, i.e. the experience of being there with real others, in modulating the empathic responses. We filmed a 360° 3D video of a person disclosing a painful autobiographical story from her past. This empathy-eliciting video was presented either in a VR head-mounted display or on a computer screen. Centrally, autonomic and facial responses were recorded both from the target in the video and from participants who viewed the video. We found that the VR condition enhanced viewers' empathic care and facial synchrony with the target. Viewers in the VR condition also reported higher levels of social presence, which mediated the effects of VR on empathic care as well as on facial synchrony. The current study highlights the potential of VR to elicit social connectedness and a caring motivation to help. Our findings imply that VR has a unique potential to motivate empathy in situations where face-to-face encounters are not possible. • Exposure to social suffering in virtual reality boosts compassion and facial synchrony. • Participants in the 360° VR condition felt higher social connection and compassion. • They also exhibited enhanced facial synchrony with the suffering video character. • These effects were mediated by increased social presence in the 360° VR condition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the rapid progress of virtual reality technology, 360 videos have become increasingly popular. Given that the resolution of a 360 video is ultra-high (generally 4K to 8K), the encoding time for this type of video is considerably high. To reduce encoding complexity, this study proposed a fast intra algorithm that is based on image texture characteristics. On the one hand, the proposed algorithm determines whether to terminate the coding unit partition early on the basis of texture complexity. On the other hand, the proposed algorithm reduces the number of candidate modes in mode decision according to texture directivity. Experimental results showed that the proposed algorithm can obtain an average time reduction rate of 53% and a Bjontegaard delta rate increase of only 1.3%, which is acceptable for rate distortion performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]