Route Tapestries: Navigating 360° Virtual Tour Videos Using Slit-Scan Visualizations

An increasingly popular way of experiencing remote places is by viewing 360° virtual tour videos, which show the surrounding view while traveling through an environment. However, finding particular locations in these videos can be difficult because current interfaces rely on distorted frame previews for navigation. To alleviate this usability issue, we propose Route Tapestries, continuous orthographic-perspective projection of scenes along camera routes. We first introduce an algorithm for automatically constructing Route Tapestries from a 360° video, inspired by the slit-scan photography technique. We then present a desktop video player interface using a Route Tapestry timeline for navigation. An online evaluation using a target-seeking task showed that Route Tapestries allowed users to locate targets 22% faster than with YouTube-style equirectangular previews and reduced the failure rate by 75% compared to a more conventional row-of-thumbnail strip preview. Our results highlight the value of reducing visual distortion and providing continuous visual contexts in previews for navigating 360°virtual tour videos.