Axis- plus Content-based Control for Camera Drones: Design and Evaluation of User Interface Concepts

It takes movie camera operators years of professional training to follow an object in an aesthetically pleasing way, both by classical means (boom, slider) and by drones. As this complex task requires a high workload and situation awareness while controlling the camera, an uncluttered and efficient user interface (UI) is preferred. The emergence of mobile devices and motion control devices incorporating automation made touch-based UIs attractive to operators. Much work has already been done on UI adaptation strategies. However, little work is trying to solve the problem of combining manual control and automation within a UI. Especially with a central premise of minimising occlusion and visual clutter in a cinematic context. We, therefore, conducted a first user study (N=15) to evaluate different design alternatives regarding occlusion and preference. Afterwards, we created a functional prototype of the most promising design. To further reduce the occlusion we applied a progressive reduction adaption strategy. We evaluated the influence of different reduction levels on workload, control, creativity support and precision in a second user study (N=24). While we could reduce the clutter, due to our design decisions we found no negative effects affecting the measured variables.