Evaluating the Effect of Cinematography on the Viewing Experience in Immersive Environment

Cinematic Virtual Reality (CVR) is an increasingly popular digital art production technology that could enhance the sense of presence when a viewer explores immersive environments. There are three important viewing-experience-related aspects, attention, sustainability, and guidance, which can be affected by the cinematography principles. Attention indicates whether the viewer is focusing on the storytelling-related region or not. Sustainability refers to viewers' ability to continuously watch the CVR content, and guidance affects the understanding of the narrative. In this paper, we conducted within-subject repeated-measures experiments on 22 participants in an HMD-based immersive environment, to explore the correlation between viewing experience and comprehensive factors. According to experimental results, we suggest an attention-comfort-understanding analysis paradigm for directing the CVR shot, which could help creators effectively attract viewers' attention, minimize the cybersickness, and deepen their understanding of narratives.