Bringing Video Browsing to Virtual Reality: Empirical Evaluation of a Novel Multimedia Drawer
Virtual reality (VR) applications are increasingly permeating our lives. The immersion provided by VR enables novel interactions with data that would be impossible in conventional environments. Especially regarding multimedia data, VR could overcome existing limitations when browsing videos to find specific scenes. This paper introduces a virtual multimedia drawer, tailored to VR environments, to enable novel ways to interact with videos. A within-subjects design experiment (N=24) was conducted to evaluate the multimedia drawer on user experience, efficiency, and effectiveness. Results show that the multimedia drawer, while taking slightly longer to locate a particular scene within a video for certain types of tasks (i.e., sequence tasks), provides statistically significantly higher levels of enjoyment, novelty, and stimulation and is preferred over conventional timeline-based approaches. Implications of quantitative and qualitative results regarding the design and features of the multimedia drawer as a video browsing method in VR are critically discussed.