On the Effect of Standing and Seated Viewing of 360° Videos on Subjective Quality Assessment: A Pilot Study

Due to the advances in head-mounted displays (HMDs), hardware and software technologies, and mobile connectivity, virtual reality (VR) applications such as viewing 360° videos on HMDs have seen an increased interest in a wide range of consumer and vertical markets. Quality assessment of digital media systems and services related to immersive visual stimuli has been one of the challenging problems of multimedia signal processing. Specifically, subjective quality assessment of 360° videos presented on HMDs is needed to obtain a ground truth on the visual quality as perceived by humans. Standardized test methodologies to assess the subjective quality of 360° videos on HMDs are currently not as developed as for conventional videos and are subject to further study. In addition, subjective tests related to quality assessment of 360° videos are commonly conducted with participants seated on a chair but neglect other options of consumption such as standing viewing. In this paper, we compare the effect that standing and seated viewing of 360° videos on an HMD has on subjective quality assessment. A pilot study was conducted to obtain psychophysical and psychophysiological data that covers explicit and implicit responses of the participants to the shown 360° video stimuli with different quality levels. The statistical analysis of the data gathered in the pilot study is reported in terms of average rating times, mean opinion scores, standard deviation of opinion scores, head movements, pupil diameter, galvanic skin response (GSR), and simulator sickness scores. The results indicate that the average rating times consumed for 360° video quality assessment are similar for standing and seated viewing. Further, the participants showed higher resolving power among different 360° video quality levels and were more confident about the given opinion scores for seated viewing. On the other hand, a larger scene exploration of 360° videos was observed for standing viewing which appears to distract from the quality assessment task. A slightly higher pupil dilation was recorded for standing viewing which suggests a slightly more immersed experience compared to seated viewing. GSR data indicate a lower degree of emotional arousal in seated viewing which seems to allow the participants to better conduct the quality assessment task. Similarly, simulator sickness symptoms are kept significantly lower when seated. The pilot study also contributes to a holistic view of subjective quality assessment and provides indicative ground truth that can guide the design of large-scale subjective tests