Could Head Motions Affect Quality When Viewing 360° Videos?

Measuring quality accurately and quickly (preferably in real time) when streaming 360$^\circ$∘ videos is essential to enhance the user experience. Most quality-of-experience metrics have primarily used viewport quality as a simple surrogate for such experiences at a given time. While this baseline approach has been later augmented by some researchers using pupil and gaze tracking, head tracking has not been considered in enough detail. This article tackles whether head motions can influence the perception of 360$^\circ$∘ videos. Inspired by the latest research, this article conceptualizes a head-motion-aware metric for measuring viewport quality. A comparative study against existing head-motion-unaware metrics reveals sizeable differences. Motivated by this, we invite the community to research this topic further and substantiate the new metric’s validity.