A rapid prototyping tool to produce 360º video-based immersive experiences enhanced with virtual/multimedia elements

Abstract While the popularity of virtual reality (VR) grows in a wide range of application contexts – e.g. entertainment, training, cultural heritage and medicine –, its economic impact is expected to reach around 15bn USD, by the year of 2020. Within VR field, 360° video has been sparking the interest of development and research communities. However, editing tools supporting 360° panoramas are usually expensive and/or demand programming skills and/or advanced user knowledge. Besides, application approaches to quickly and intuitively set up such 360° video-based VR environments complemented with diverse types of parameterizable virtual assets and multimedia elements are still hard to find. Thereby, this paper aims to propose a system specification to simply and rapidly configure immersive VR environments composed of surrounding 360° video spheres that can be complemented with parameterizable multimedia contents – namely 3D models, text and spatial sound –, whose behavior can be either time-range or user-interaction dependent. Moreover, a preliminary prototype that follows a substantial part of the previously mentioned specification and implements the enhancement of 360° videos with time-range dependent virtual assets is presented. Preliminary tests evaluating usability and user satisfaction were also carried out with 30 participants, from which encouraging results were achieved.