Virtual reality has the potential to revolutionize the content industry, and with it, we have uncovered a whole new way to analyze human behavior as audiences consume media. Consumer media analytics have always been about understanding demographics, calculating ad revenue, and gauging performance. The new VR medium introduces an exciting opportunity to explore and understand how people engage with content.
Unlike traditional video, where the viewport is a flat surface, virtual reality allows us to track where people look. This generates an astonishing amount of data, representing everyone’s experience in a piece of VR content. At Littlstar, we have built a VR analytics platform to harness this data, and we are excited about exposing it in innovative ways. Our goal is to make our data as accessible and meaningful as possible, and provide unprecedented access to understanding and even monetizing user engagement.
One way we have exposed our data is through heatmap visualizations of where people looked in VR. Using color gradients overlaid on the original 360 video (or VR scene), we are able to represent the density of viewers looking at each area throughout the video. The result is a beautiful, fluid heatmap visualization that demonstrates how people engaged with the scene.