There are so many discussions on how to view 360 degree video content, and I'm actually quite surprised that everyone seems to be orienting at this as the standard for viewing videos in VR. With the current technology where it is, we get much higher quality video by limiting our range to 180 degrees, or anything less than 360 for that matter. I totally get that in a game we want to look around everywhere and explore without breaking immersion, but video content is usually choreographed to guide the viewer, so I find myself rarely looking around everywhere and mostly just trying to sit back and enjoy the experience. The whole time I was watching "Evolution of Verse", I was wishing there was just a little more resolution and quality too it. And having rewatched it several times, there's almost a frustration that I have to turn all the way around to see everything that's going on. To all the people shooting videos out there, and all the artists creating VR animations, I just want to pose the question... why 360 when we can do much better than this blurry compressed experience if we close up the FOV some?
I know the argument usually is that seeing the edge of the frame breaks immersion, but I'm finding most of these 360 videos so low res that you can't achieve immersion in the first place. The stills in the ORBX player give a great preview of what we have to look forward too with a higher resolution. Even though we can't reach that with video yet, cutting down on the degrees would at least get us a step closer.
I'd also be interested in seeing solutions where we have diminishing quality/resolution on the sides. The lens distortion helps with this a little by compressing the pixels at the center, but maybe there could be a format that somehow contains a gradated resolution? Or cube maps where the front image is higher res than the others (even though this would prob create a seam)?
"bthiem333" wrote: I know the argument usually is that seeing the edge of the frame breaks immersion,
There should be a workaround for this:
1. Limit the view direction change and never allow to see the edge.
2. Distort the gaze-change-to-vr-view-change map so that the vr view smoothly stops at the boundary with a slight excess of head direction change.
This would be interesting to see, but in my experience from testing DK1 and DK2, suddenly restricting the ability of the head to move is actually more off-putting than seeing the edge of frame. We've been trained to see the edges of our frame due to watching videos on monitors, but the sensation of being restricted from turning is not something we're used too and probably more immersion breaking. That being said I would really like to see these things being experimented with more.
"bthiem333" wrote: I know the argument usually is that seeing the edge of the frame breaks immersion,
There should be a workaround for this:
1. Limit the view direction change and never allow to see the edge.
2. Distort the gaze-change-to-vr-view-change map so that the vr view smoothly stops at the boundary with a slight excess of head direction change.
This would be interesting to see, but in my experience from testing DK1 and DK2, suddenly restricting the ability of the head to move is actually more off-putting than seeing the edge of frame. We've been trained to see the edges of our frame due to watching videos on monitors, but the sensation of being restricted from turning is not something we're used too and probably more immersion breaking. That being said I would really like to see these things being experimented with more.
The FOV of GearVR is 95 degrees. Therefore, to see a 180-degree video, you need to turn your head + your torso to 42.5 degrees in all directions assuming you are sitting on a fixed chair. Adding 10 or more degrees to them would not cause you to sense being restricted.
At least we have two different options for watching a 180-degree video.
I think a 360-degree video is best for watching while standing or sitting on a rotating chair.
You bring up some really good points. It seems like we should figure out, for every device given its FOV, what is a good range for videos? It may be that 180 degrees isn't the ideal number. Finding the right compromise between comfort and image quality should be approached for each device and its capabilities.
The VR Porn stuff is an example for 180 degrees video. And it uses the spare power to make the video HFR (High Frame Rate) to boost the realism of body movement.
you have to split the problem in two. resolution of the original video (what you get ) and resolution of the display( what you see). If you make a video format to support partial viewing of 360 video, you could perfectly imagine a very high resolution 360 source producing a hight resolution 100 deg fov. Just imagine you can split video in vertical bands (lets say 15 deg bands) and each band is a different stream into a video. then to make a 90 FOV you would need 6 bands (or 8 for 120 deg FOV). You would need to decode only the viewed bands, and turning your head would just be a matter of switching bands.
today you are obliged to decode the full 360 to get only a third of it displayed, that's a ressource hog on memory and cpu and that's the problem.
