Positioning of Subtitles in Cinematic Virtual Reality

Abstract

Cinematic Virtual Reality has been increasing in popularity in recent years.Watching 360 degree movies with a head mounted display, the viewer can freely choose the direction of view and thus the visible section of the movie. Therefore, a new approach for the placements of subtitles is needed. In a preliminary study we compared several static methods, where the position of the subtitles is not influenced by the movie content. The preferred method was used in the main study to compare it with dynamic, worldreferenced subtitling, where the subtitles are placed in the movie world. The position of the subtitles depends on the scene and is close to the speaking person. Even if the participants did not prefer one of these methods in general, for some cases in our experiments world-referenced subtitles led to a higher score of presence, less sickness and lower workload.