A novel method to enhance the touristic 360∘ promotional video experience

Promotional 360∘ videos are now widely used to promote touristic sites, giving consumers a more immersive glimpse of what they can expect from those places. However, these 360∘ videos often comprise so much information that it overloads the users, not allowing them to benefit from such a rich multimedia experience. To overcome this issue, we propose and evaluate a novel method that allows the experience of immersive 360∘ promotional videos to be more interactive and informative without overloading users. The evaluation study focuses on how the proposed interaction method performs versus the non-interactive method in terms of user satisfaction, presence, and cybersickness in both a low-immersive (computer monitor) setup and an immersive platform (head-mounted display (HMD)). Our sample (N = 50) was randomly divided into four groups: 360∘ (computer monitor without interaction), 360∘Interaction (computer monitor with interaction), IVR360∘ (HMD without interaction) and IVR360∘Interaction (HMD with interaction). The results show that the novel proposed method is preferred by users over the non-interactive approach regardless of the setup (low-immersive or immersive). For cybersickness, there were no differences across all the experimental scenarios. We conclude that our method has the potential to bring added value to touristic promotion when compared to conventional promotional approaches.

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