A Novel Method for Assessing the Spatial Presence of Omnidirectional Videos: Comparing Virtual and Real World

With the development of immersive media technologies, omnidirectional video service has been popularized at an accelerated speed due to the sense of presence it offered. Accurately measuring the user's subjective sense of presence on virtual reality (VR) devices are urgently required by video service providers and VR device manufacturers to further improve their quality of service. So far, there is no standardized methodology available for the conduction of the subjective experiment toward the user's sense of presence when viewing omnidirectional videos. In this paper, we designed a novel subjective assessment method, which evaluates the presence of omnidirectional videos where the scenes have been previously experienced in the real world by subjects. In this setup, subjects can easily and accurately form their sense of presence when viewing omnidirectional videos using previous observations of the real environment as references. The experimental results demonstrated that the proposed method is able to obtain reliable quantitative results toward the sense of presence.