Abstract
360Β° video and Virtual Reality are powerful techniques for giving viewers a sense of `Being There', and are becoming increasingly popular. However, giving the viewer the freedom to look around also results in a new challenge for subtitling. We have implemented and tested four different subtitles behaviours with a group of subtitle users, testing against a User Experience Framework for Subtitles.
We report user preferences, and have performed statistical analysis on ratings given by participants and thematic analysis on the semi-structured interviews. The discriminatory themes were: effort, missing out, obstruction, distraction and immersion. Making subtitles easy to locate without restricting the viewer's ability to explore the scene are key. The implementation using a standard head-up display was found to be the best performing, although further research is required to assess its suitability for longer content. We make recommendations for improving our implementation and highlight avenues for future research.
