Dr. Sebastian Knorr

Dr. Sebastian Knorr is Senior Research Scientist and Lecturer within the Communication Systems Group at the Technical University of Berlin. Before he joint TU Berlin, he was Senior Research Scientist within the V-SENSE project at Trinity College Dublin. Between 2009 and 2016, Dr. Knorr was the founding member and CEO/CTO of imcube labs GmbH, Germany and Beijing imcube Technologies Co., Ltd., China, and the COO/ CTO of imcube Technologies Limited, Hong Kong. Besides the management of the companies, he also worked on 3D TV and giant screen projects from BBC and BSkyB as Post-Conversion Stereographer and Stereo 3D Producer.
Between 2002 and 2009, Dr. Knorr acted as project manager and senior researcher in the Communication Systems Group at the Technical University of Berlin. In 2007 he invented the process of automatic 2D to 3D image conversion with highly advanced computer vision technology and received the Dr.-Ing. degree (Ph.D.) with highest honors in 2008, respectively. In 2012, he was the recipient of the Scott Helt Memorial Award for the best paper published in the IEEE Transactions on Broadcasting in 2011.
Dr. Knorr received the German Multimedia Business Award of the Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology in 2008, and was awarded by the initiative “Germany-Land of Ideas” which is sponsored by the German government, commerce and industry in 2009, respectively. He is a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the German Society of Television- and Cinema Technology (FKTG e.V.).

Synopsis

Methods of storytelling in cinema have well established conventions that have been built over the course of its history and the development of the format. In 360° film many of the techniques that have formed part of this cinematic language or visual narrative are not easily applied or are not applicable due to the nature of the format i.e. not contained the border of the screen. In this context, we analyzed how end-users view 360° video in the presence of directional cues and evaluate if they are able to follow the actual story of narrative 360° films. We  first let filmmakers create an intended scan-path, the so called director’s cut, by setting position markers in the omnidirectional content for eight short 360° films. Alongside this the  filmmakers provided additional information regarding directional cues and plot points. Then, we performed a subjective test with 20 participants watching the films with a head-mounted display and recorded their head orientations. The resulting scan-paths of the participants are then compared against the director’s cut using different scan-path similarity measures.