Lulu Timeline: VR Video Timeline with Expanded Interactive Scope and Fine-tuning Function

With the growing market of virtual reality(VR) during these years, watching immersive videos in VR headset has become more and more popular, which demands more convenient video player design in immersive environment. Timeline control, as an important part of video player, enabling users to seek to particular time of video, however has no mature design established in VR yet. We propose Lulu Timeline, a VR video timeline design to enhance users’ ability of controlling video play time and reduce work load, which utilizes space that is often overlooked in general design, and would adjust the scaling of timeline playhead movement based on video duration. To determine the actual effect of this new timeline, we conducted a user study with 19 participants, in which we compared our design with the most popular design currently within two tasks. Based on the analysis of subjective and objective data, our design performs higher accuracy, speed, and can significantly reduce users’ workload, helping them focus their attention on areas-of-interest.