Influence of Directional Sound Cues on Users’ Exploration Across 360° Movie Cuts

Virtual reality (VR) is a powerful medium for $360^{\circ }$360∘ storytelling, yet content creators are still in the process of developing cinematographic rules for effectively communicating stories in VR. Traditional cinematography has relied for over a century on well-established techniques for editing, and one of the most recurrent resources for this are cinematic cuts that allow content creators to seamlessly transition between scenes. One fundamental assumption of these techniques is that the content creator can control the camera; however, this assumption breaks in VR: Users are free to explore $360^{\circ }$360∘ around them. Recent works have studied the effectiveness of different cuts in $360^{\circ }$360∘ content, but the effect of directional sound cues while experiencing these cuts has been less explored. In this work, we provide the first systematic analysis of the influence of directional sound cues in users’ behavior across $360^{\circ }$360∘ movie cuts, providing insights that can have an impact on deriving conventions for VR storytelling.