Device effect on panoramic video+context tasks

Abstract

Panoramic imagery is viewed daily by thousands of people, and panoramic video imagery is becoming more common. This imagery is viewed on many different devices with different properties, and the effect of these differences on spatio-temporal task performance is yet untested on these imagery. We adapt a novel panoramic video interface and conduct a user study to discover whether display type affects spatio-temporal reasoning task performance across desktop monitor, tablet, and head-mounted displays. We discover that, in our complex reasoning task, HMDs are as effective as desktop displays even if participants felt less capable, but tablets were less effective than desktop displays even though participants felt just as capable. Our results impact virtual tourism, telepresence, and surveillance applications, and so we state the design implications of our results for panoramic imagery systems.