Sight surfers: 360º videos and maps navigation

Increasingly, users are enjoying and technology is supporting, capturing, sharing and accessing videos shot from their perspectives and experiences. Video is appreciated for its power to capture and present events and scenarios with great authenticity, realism and emotional impact. 360º video allows a step further towards more immersive experiences, by capturing the image all around, while hypervideo supports structuring and navigation of video and related information; and technology for capturing 360º video and its trajectory are becoming more accessible to the users, allowing to support more powerful video user experiences. In this paper, we present Sight Surfers, an interactive web application for the visualization and navigation of georeferenced 360º hypervideos, designed to empower users in their immersive video experiences, both accessing other users' videos and sharing their own, as novel forms of entertainment, culture and even art. We identify main challenges and describe its design and first user evaluation, with very encouraging results.