Google looked at the analytics for 360° videos posted on YouTube, and found that people rarely bother to turn their heads. In fact, people spend 75% of their time looking towards the front 90° of a video. To do this research, Google created heatmaps showing where people focus the most in videos.
Google also found that around 20% of the views were by people looking from behind them at the full 360° space in some of the most popular VR videos.
Anyone who uploads 360° videos to YouTube can access the heatmaps for their videos by going to the video manager and looking for the 360 heatmaps tool under analytics.
It is recommended that content producers should wait a few seconds at the start of the video before jumping into the action, as viewers usually need time to get comfortable with headsets.
VR viewers barely turn their heads
