Viewport-driven DASH media playback for interactive storytelling - a seamless non-linear storyline experience.

Over the past few years, the HTTP Adaptive Streaming (HAS) technologies, e.g. the MPEG-DASH standard (DASH), became the predominant form of online video streaming. 360 Virtual Reality (VR) content have recently emerged on video streaming platform as a new immersive format but limits the interaction with the viewer to looking around via head rotation. From storytelling domain, interactive storytelling is a known technique to immerse the viewer into the story by allowing him to influence the way the story unfolds. In this demo, we combine a VR 360 video player and interactive storytelling delivered using DASH. By adding DASH-level signaling when branching occurs in the storyline and by updating the reference dash.js JavaScript player, it is possible to create an interactive 360 video experience that is seamless to the user. That is, each person experiences a different storyline based on its head movements whether it is by explicit cues, e.g. choosing a certain outcome to a scene, or implicitly by following narrative cues inserted by the content creator such as moving objects, character movements in the scene. Such seamless experience aims at maximizing the emotional response of the user on the content as intended by the content creator.