Workshop: Subtitling in Immersive Environments

On 17^th June Mario Montagud, Chris Hughes, Anna Matamala and Enric Torres presented a workshop on ‘Subtitling in Immersive Environments’ at the ‘Media for All 8’ Conference, to an audience of more than 20 subtitle producers.

 

It is becoming more and more essential that any media experience should be fully inclusive and accessible to all users regardless of their ability. With the current trend towards immersive experiences such as Virtual Reality (VR) and 360^o video, it is important that these environments are adapted to be fully accessible, however until recently the focus has been simply adapting the existing techniques to fit immersive displays, rather considering new approaches which have been designed specifically for this new technology.

 

In this three-hour workshop we demonstrated the use of subtitles within Immersive environments, using the tools and player developed through the ImAc Project. Until now most of the existing approaches to subtitling immersive content have been to simply render the 2D subtitles into the 360º display, but we explained the ImAc workflow showing how it can be adopted to improve the end user experience. While subtitling in 360º is now proving to be one of the most challenging formats, this workshop demonstrated the many challenges of Immersive Subtitling and discussed the potential solutions being considered and assessed within the the ImAc project. The participants all took the opportunity to experience immersive video and to feedback on their first impressions of both the ImAc player and the editing tools.

Figure 1: Image of the workshop where people are sitting at desks with computer screens and watching a presentation

Figure 2: Image of the workshop where people are sitting at desks with computer screens and watching a presentation by a female presenter and a male presenter is at a desk explaining something to someone

Figure 3: Image of the workshop where people are sitting at desks with computer screens and watching a presentation.

Tagged as: subtitles, workshop