Automatically Identify and Create a Highlight Cinematic in a Virtual Reality Action Game

Abstract: Users sharing their experiences on social media and streaming sites becomes increasingly important for marketing games. Virtual reality has the added challenge that the head movement is sometimes too erratic to capture and present on a flat screen. This paper solves this issue by automatically generating highlight cinematics for virtual reality action games using new camera angles to create easily shareable media focusing on non-players. The problem is solved by first identifying the interest over time, then split it into sequences of coherent action. The most interesting sequences are selected for the highlight reel where each sequence is split into clips tied to a specific camera angle. The highlight cinematics was evaluated using a survey. The results suggest that dynamic cameras are more engaging and interesting than static cameras. The selection of camera angles gave more significant results than the length of the highlight or the intensity of the action, pointing towards the presentation of the highlight cinematic being more important than the actual highlighted material for non-players.