A Comparison of Visual Attention Guiding Approaches for 360° Image-Based VR Tours

Mechanisms for guiding a user’s visual attention to a particular point of interest play a crucial role in areas such as collaborative VR and AR, cinematic VR, and automated or live guided tour experiences in xR-based education. The attention guiding mechanism serves as a communication tool that helps users find entities currently not visible in their view, referenced for instance by another user or in some accompanying audio commentary. We report on a user study in which we compared three different visual guiding mechanisms (arrow, butterfly guide, and radar) in the context of 360° image-based educational VR tour applications of real-world sites. A fourth condition with no guidance tool available was added as a baseline. We investigate the question: How do the different approaches compare in terms of target finding performance and participants’ assessments of the experiences. While all three mechanisms were perceived as improvements over the no-guidance condition and resulted in significantly improved target finding times, the arrow mechanism stands out as the most generally accepted and favored approach, whereas the other two (butterfly guide and radar) received a more polarized assessment due to their specific strengths and drawbacks.