VR 360º subtitles. Designing a test suite with eye-tracking technology

Subtitle production is an increasingly creative accessibility service. New technologies allow for placing subtitles at any location of the screen in a variety of formats, shapes, typography, font size, and colour. The screen now affords accessible creativity, with subtitles able to provide novel experiences beyond those offered by traditional language translation. Immersive environments multiply 2D subtitles features to new creative viewing modalities. Testing subtitles in eXtended Reality (XR) has pushed existing methods to address user need and enjoyment of audiovisual content in 360º viewing displays. After an overview of existing subtitle features in XR, the article describes the challenges of generating subtitle stimuli to test meaningful user viewing behaviours, based on eye-tracking technology. The approach for the first experimental setup for implementing creative subtitles in XR using eye-tracking is given, in line with novel research questions. The choices made regarding sound, duration and storyboard are described. Conclusions show that testing subtitles in immersive media environments is both a linguistic and an artistic endeavour, which requires an agile framework fostering contrast and comparison of different functionalities. Results of the present, preliminary study shed light on future experimental setups with eye-tracking.