Agent-assisted multi-viewpoint video viewer and its gaze-based evaluation

Humans see things from various viewpoints but nobody attempts to see anything from every viewpoint owing to physical restrictions and the great effort required. Intelligent interfaces for viewing multi-viewpoint videos may remove the restrictions in effective ways and direct us toward a new visual world. We propose an agent-assisted multi-viewpoint video viewer that incorporates (1) target-centered viewpoint switching and (2) social viewpoint recommendation. The viewer stabilizes an object at the center of the display field using the former function, which helps to fix the user's gaze on the target object. To identify the popular viewing behavior for particular content, the latter function exploits a histogram of the viewing log in terms of time, viewpoints, and the target of many personal viewing experiences. We call this knowledge source of the director agent a viewgram. The agent automatically constructs the preferred viewpoint sequence for each target. We conducted user studies to analyze user behavior, especially eye movement, while using the viewer. The results of statistical analyses showed that the viewpoint sequence extracted from a viewgram includes a more distinct perspective for each target, and the target-centered viewpoint switching encourages the user to gaze at the display center where the target is located during the viewing. The proposed viewer can provide more effective perspectives for the main attractions in scenes.