VR Experiences That Focus User Attention

One question content creators ask when approaching VR for the first time is, what style or genre performs best? While the field is too diverse to yield a single, definitive answer, it’s worth considering what’s working in some specific cases. In this post, I examine viewing patterns of several genres of 360 videos, based on the thousands of videos we’ve analyzed at Vrtigo.

Why 360 videos? While they represent only one type of VR experience among many (and some argue they aren’t even real VR experiences), they’re a useful starting point since creating and consuming 360 videos is relatively easy, so there are many available to analyze.

The question of measuring performance is more difficult. For the purposes of this post, I’ll be using a metric we created at Vrtigo called audience focus, which measures how dispersed the viewers’ gazes are at a each point in the video’s timeline. So a high focus means the viewers are all looking in the same direction, and a low focus means they are looking in many different directions. Audience focus varies with time, so to produce a single statistic for each video I took its average over the video’s duration. This per-video aggregate is called the focus index.

The videos were grouped into 16 different genres or categories, and each boxplot shows the distribution of focus indexes for the videos in that genre. Since videos can belong to multiple genres (it’s possible to be both a Sports and Entertainment video), there is overlap between the genres.

Interpreting this chart requires some care since a high or low focus isn’t intrinsically valuable — it’s just a description of how viewers are behaving. Whether a high or low focus means the video is performing well depends on the creator’s goals for the experience. We’ll examine some specific cases:

• Gaming tends to have the highest focus. This could be because many gaming videos feature a conventional “flat” video embedded in the 360 view, so the viewers’ gazes are naturally drawn there. For those videos, higher focus means viewers are engaged with the screen-within-a-screen.
• Food & Drink and Cars & Vehicles are high-focus categories. Both tend to showcase specific objects of interest (food and cars, respectively). Here, higher focus indicates more engagement with the video’s subject. This may also explain Music’s higher focus, since the videos often show a musician on stage who is eliciting attention via visual and audio cues.
• Pets & Animals videos have the lowest focus. This is unsurprising since this category includes many nature documentaries, where viewers are meant to explore their surroundings. A lower focus here is positive if the video’s goal is for you to experience nature.
• Travel & Events and News & Politics have lower focus. These are both categories that tend to follow a documentary format, so the creators’ often want the viewers to explore the scenes around them.

For the categories in the middle of the chart, the signal is less clear since they have neither high nor low focus in general. A closer look at the time-varying audience focus for the individual videos in those categories may reveal more about how well they are performing.

While the above correlations between audience focus and engagement aren’t definitive, they do provide guidelines for measuring the performance of VR experiences. If a 360 video has a high audience focus and it’s in a category that typically has low focus, then it may not be achieving the desired effect.

As the VR ecosystem continues to evolve, we anticipate the creation of more movement-based performance metrics like audience focus. These metrics will be used to measure different types of engagement, with specific statistics for different styles and genres. There is much potential to use quantitative tools to create optimal viewer experiences, and we’re just getting started.

Vrtigo is the next generation VR analytics platform for content creators, editors, producers, and marketers.