The impact of camera height in cinematic virtual reality

Abstract

Watching a 360° movie with Head Mounted Displays (HMDs) the viewer feels to be inside the movie and can experience it in an immersive way. The head of the viewer is exactly in the same place as the camera was when the scene was recorded. Viewing a movie by HMDs from the perspective of the camera can raise some challenges, e.g. heights of well-known objects can irritate the viewer in the case the camera height does not correspond to the physical eye height. The aim of this work is to study how the position of the camera influences presence, sickness and the user experience of the viewer. For that we considered several watching postures as well as various camera heights. The results of our experiments suggest that differences between camera and eye heights are more accepted, if the camera position is lower than the viewer's own eye height. Additionally, sitting postures are preferred and can be adapted easier than standing postures. These results can be applied to improve guidelines for 360° filmmakers.