Exploring Visual Guidance in 360-degree Videos.

360-degree videos offer a novel viewing experience with the ability to explore virtual environments much more freely than before. Technologies and aesthetics behind this approach of film-making are not yet fully developed. The newly gained freedom creates challenges and new methods have to be established to guide users through narratives. This work provides an overview of methods to guide users visually and contributes insights from an experiment exploring visual guidance in 360-degree videos with regard to task performance and user preferences. In addition, smartphone and HMD are used as output devices to examine possible differences. The results show that using viewers preferred HMD over smartphone and visual guidance over its absence. Overall, the Object to Follow method performed best, followed by the Person to Follow method. Based on the results, we defined a set of guidelines for drawing the viewers’ attention in 360-degree videos.