Shot Orientation Controls for
Interactive Cinematography with 360 Video

Abstract

Virtual reality filmmakers creating 360◦ video currently rely on cinematography techniques that were developed for traditional narrow field of view film. They typically edit together a sequence of shots so that they appear at a fixed orientation irrespective of the viewer’s field of view. But because viewers set their own camera orientation they may miss important story content while looking in the wrong direction. We present new interactive shot orientation techniques that are designed to help viewers see all of the important content in 360◦ video stories. Our viewpoint-oriented technique reorients the shot at each cut so that the most important content lies in the the viewer’s current field of view. Our active reorientation technique lets the viewer press a button to immediately reorient the shot so that important content lies in their field of view. We present a 360◦ video player which implements these techniques and conduct a user study which finds that users spend 5.2-9.5% more time viewing (manually labeled) important points of the scene with our techniques compared to the traditional fixed-orientation cuts. In practice, 360◦ video creators may label important content, but we also provide an automatic method for determining important content in existing 360◦ videos.