Watching HMD-based 360° video has become in-creasing popular as a medium for immersive viewing of photo-realistic content. To evaluate subjective video quality, researchers typically prompt users to provide an overall Quality of Experience (QoE) score after viewing a stimulus. However, since users can adjust their viewport throughout a 360° video, a higher level of spatiotemporal granularity is needed for adaptive 360° video streaming. To address this, we design several real-time, continuous QoE annotation input and peripheral visualization techniques, with the goal of minimizing mental workload and distraction during score acquisition. Drawing on two parallel co-design sessions with seven experts, we find that touchpad and joystick are most suitable for continuous input, with DotMorph (circle with tick label that varies in filling) for peripheral state feedback. We contribute design findings for testing QoE score acquisition techniques during HMD-based 360° video watching, which enable more precise optimization of adaptive video streaming quality.@en

Watching 360 videos using Virtual Reality (VR) head-mounted displays (HMDs) provides interactive and immersive experiences, where videos can evoke different emotions. Existing emotion self-report techniques within VR however are either retrospective or interrupt the immersive experience. To address this, we introduce the Continuous Physiological and Behavioral Emotion Annotation Dataset for 360 Videos (CEAP-360VR). We conducted a controlled study (N=32) where participants used a Vive Pro Eye HMD to watch eight validated affective 360 video clips, and annotated their valence and arousal (V-A) continuously. We collected (a) behavioral (head and eye movements; pupillometry) signals (b) physiological (heart rate, skin temperature, electrodermal activity) responses (c) momentary emotion self-reports (d) within-VR discrete emotion ratings (e) motion sickness, presence, and workload. We show the consistency of continuous annotation trajectories and verify their mean V-A annotations. We find high consistency between viewed 360 video regions across subjects, with higher consistency for eye than head movements. We furthermore run baseline classification experiments, where Random Forest classifiers with 2s segments show good accuracies for subject-independent models: 66.80% (V) and 64.26% (A) for binary classification; 49.92% (V) and 52.20% (A) for 3-class classification. Our open dataset allows further experiments with continuous emotion self-reports collected in 360 VR environments, which can enable automatic assessment of immersive Quality of Experience (QoE) andmomentary affective states.

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With the increasing availability of head-mounted displays (HMDs) that show immersive 360° VR content, it is important to understand to what extent these immersive experiences can evoke emotions. Typically to collect emotion ground truth labels, users rate videos through post-experience self-reports that are discrete in nature. However, post-stimuli self-reports are temporally imprecise, especially after watching 360° videos. In this work, we design six continuous emotion annotation techniques for the Oculus Rift HMD aimed at minimizing workload and distraction. Based on a co-design session with six experts, we contribute HaloLight and DotSize, two continuous annotation methods deemed unobtrusive and easy to understand. We discuss the next challenges for evaluating the usability of these techniques, and reliability of continuous annotations.

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We demonstrate an HMD-based annotation tool for collecting precise emotion ground truth labels while users are watching 360° videos in Virtual Reality (VR). Our tool uses an HTC VIVE Pro Eye HMD for displaying 360° videos, a Joy-Con controller for inputting emotion annotations, and an Empatica E4 wristband for capturing physiological signals. Timestamps of these devices are synchronized via an NTP server. Following dimensional emotion models, users can report their emotion in terms of valence and arousal as they watch a video in VR. Annotation feedback is provided through two peripheral visualization techniques: HaloLight and DotSize. Our annotation tool provides a starting point for researchers to design momentary and continuous self-reports in virtual environments to enable fine-grained emotion recognition.

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