Web-Mediated Augmentation and Interactivity Enhancement of Omni-Directional Video in Both 2D and 3D

Abstract

Video consumption has since the emergence of the medium largely been a passive affair. This paper proposes augmented Omni-Directional Video (ODV) as a novel format to engage viewers and to open up new ways of interacting with video content. Augmented ODV blends two important contemporary technologies: Augmented Video Viewing and 360 degree video. The former allows for the addition of interactive features to Web-based video playback, while the latter unlocks spatial video navigation opportunities. The augmented ODV principle is exposed to developers through a collection of standards-compliant Web interfaces, this way allowing for a wide range of usage scenarios and heterogeneous consumer profiles to be targeted in a broad spectrum of application domains. The paper covers the extensive set of technologies powering the concept, hereby addressing a variety of topics ranging from content authoring and editing to visualization and rendering. Two use case prototypes showcase the expressiveness and practical feasibility of the augmented ODV methodology, while performance evaluation results establish that the augmented ODV implementation is computationally sufficiently lightweight to warrant execution on low-cost PC hardware and even tablet devices.