With the increased interest in drone racing throughout the past decade, understanding the needs of the consumers will be critical in making key business decisions. This study explores the change in opinions and emotions of the online community to determine the sentiment and key themes surrounding drone racing.

Today, hundreds of millions of people spectate eSports. eSports fans are spending their time watching live internet broadcasts, referred to as streams, on platforms such as YouTube and Twitch. With the high levels of interaction and the live-broadcasting nature, eSports streaming consumption lead to a significant effect on eSports industry (Sjöblom & Hamari, 2017). As a result, eSport has been growing definitely as a viable spectator sport (Bornemark, 2013). In the line with it, drone racing is gaining popularity as a sport type where players control drones, typically radio-controlled aircrafts equipped with cameras, by wearing head-mounted displays (HMD) showing the live stream camera feed of first person view point from the drones. Recently, drone racing has been recognized as a new type of eSports since it involves digital communication technology, specifically virtual reality (VR) technology, and cutting edge computing and control engineering to produce aircrafts that are capable of speeds in excess of 150 Kilometer per hour and acceleration as fast as F1 cars. In essence, drone racing combines VR gaming with real world action to create a new genre, Mixed Reality Sports. The uniqueness of drone racing comes from the first person perspective. Due to first person view display glasses, pilots immerse into their drones; they experience the feeling of sitting on the nose of the drone. Furthermore, the immersive experience can be shared with the spectators through the first person view video that the pilots see. Drone racing provides its spectators this type of unique immersive experience, but the problem is that spectators of first person view drone racing can easily get motion sickness/VR sickness. Moreover, spectators can easily miss out on what is happening and thus need some structure to the experience (Hemb, 2017). A proper system is needed to provide unprecedented immersive experiences to them and VR technology can provide more optimal views for spectating drone race. However, there are only a few studies on what drone racing spectators want to see and how they enjoy VR content of drone racing. Therefore, the goal of this study is to assess and evaluate drone racing spectating. A series of spectating modes (mirroring, 3D and VR) is assessed in a series of experiments and user testing sessions to determine the preferred mode for spectating drone racing VR content and analyze the relationships between spectating modes and level of audience immersion and presence.

본 논문에서는 효과적인 레이싱 드론 조종 훈련을 위한 VR 콘텐츠의 기획 및 제작에 대해 다루고자 한다. 실제 환경에서의 직접적인 레이싱 드론 조종 훈련은 공간적, 경제적 한계점이 분명한데, 이러한 한계점에 대한 해결책으로 VR 기반 드론 잠입액션 게임 <Drone S>의 제작을 통해 제시하고, 효과적인 드론 조종 능력 증진을 강구하고자 한다. 특히 FPV 고글과 HMD 기반 VR의 유사성을 활용하여 실제와 유사한 환경에서의 가상현실 콘텐츠를 기획하였으며, 레이싱 드론과 드론 레이싱에서 사용되는 구조물의 특징을 고려하여 가상 드론과 맵 및 장애물을 디자인하였다. 또한 점진적으로 증가하는 장애물의 난이도를 통해 사용자의 몰입도와 현존감을 높이고자 하였다.