Immersive virtual reality news: A study of user experience and media effects
Introduction
In recent years, with the continuous reduction in the price of various smart sensor devices and the development of natural human-computer interaction technology, virtual reality (VR) technology has developed rapidly. The basic features of VR can be summarized with three “Is”, i.e., immersion, interaction and imagination (Bowman, 2004). Immersion refers to the user being immersed in a computer-generated virtual space and being able to obtain perceptions that are identical or similar to those of the real world thereby experiencing “presence” or “telepresence”. Interaction refers to human-computer interaction that enables the user to interact with a multidimensional virtual information space with gesture recognition, speech recognition, eye-tracking, brain-computer interface, and other natural interaction technology through hardware and software, which gradually approximate real world interactions. Imagination refers to users’ ability to imagine future progress in a virtual world through various thinking processes, such as logical thinking, reasoning, and associating, based on acquired information as well as their behaviors in the system. In recent years, VR technology has recently attracted worldwide attention and has been successfully applied to many fields such as education, emergency exercise, real estate development, industrial design, aerospace development, medicine, games, and entertainment.
In addition to these applications, VR technology has been used in the field of journalism, where the concept of immersive VR news has been proposed (Peña, 2010; Shin, 2018a; Shin, 2018b). So-called immersive VR news refers to a news product that enables viewers to experience certain events and specific circumstances of the news reports from a first-person perspective. The basic idea is to allow viewers to enter a virtually reproduced scenario of a news story as a digital avatar to experience the story. As opposed to traditional 2D video news, immersive VR systems (e.g., head-mounted displays and online VR) provide the audience with unprecedented, rich and diverse experiences that enhance their multichannel perceptions (visual, auditory, tactile, and even olfactory and gustatory perceptions). Such immersive storytelling is conducive to heightening the emotional participation of the audience in the current news event and is thus a form of deep immersive news (Peña, 2010).
However, despite the fanfare, strong response, and sensational effect at its advent, immersive VR news nonetheless remains a novel journalist paradigm. As the research on its narrative framework deepens in academia and industry, the following issues regarding immersive VR news have gradually emerged:
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Due to the interactive nature of VR technology, users are no longer passive recipients of content; rather, to a certain extent, they have autonomy and can actively explore news content to a certain extent. Users’ perception and intent can significantly impact their experience of immersive VR news (Shin et al., 2018b). Traditional video news is conducive to mostly one-way information communication whereas immersive VR news is characterized by two-way human-computer interaction. Thus, the two news experiences may conflict with each other.
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Compared with traditional 2D video news, due to the fading of the physical barriers of information transmission, immersive VR news exposes users to a virtual environment. Users may thus become obsessed with the element of “experience” as they are immersed in the news, and they may consequently ignore important pieces of information that the news event is designed to convey. Therefore, the question of how to coordinate the relationship between the “output information” of news and the “immersion” of VR is one of the difficulties facing immersive VR news.
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When using immersive VR technology to reproduce a news site, the fairness and credibility of the news itself can be affected by various factors, such as the inappropriate screening and collecting of information and biased perspectives or emotional tendencies in reconstructing the news scene. For example, in an ultra-real “mimetic environment”, users tend to confuse the virtual world with reality and believe that “seeing is believing.” If the content producer has clear subjective intent, users’ cognition tends to lose objectivity and the ability to comprehend the information presented.
In summary, many issues regarding the application process of immersive VR news remain unresolved. Some scholars (Riva et al., 2007; Hardee, 2016; Sirkkunen et al., 2016; Vázquez-Herrero et al., 2017; Hardee et al., 2017; Laws 2017; Tse et al., 2017; Sundar et al., 2017; Seo, 2019) believe that immersive VR news has the advantage of providing an unprecedented multisensory experience for audiences, which helps strengthen their emotional involvement in news events. However, other scholars (Nolan, 2003; Kent, 2015; Kool, 2016; Wang et al., 2018) have argued that the virtual reproduction of news has negative impacts on the fairness, authenticity, and comprehensiveness of the presented content.
To address the above problems, we conducted an empirical study to examine users’ experience (e.g., immersion and empathy) and media effects regarding the accuracy, credibility, and emotion of audiences’ acquired information through immersive VR news, an emerging method of news reporting, in the context of new media.
In this paper, we first review related work and introduce the objectives of this study and then present our experimental process and results in detail. Next, we analyze the results and generate design guidelines for immersive VR news. Finally, we summarize the limitations of this study and suggest directions for future studies.
Section snippets
Related work
Immersive news is a new form of news. Since its introduction by Peña et al. (2010), it has attracted extensive attention from academia and the news industry and has spurred many practical explorations and trials (Kent 2015; Kool, 2016; Sirkkunen et al., 2016; Hardee, 2016; Hardee et al., 2017; Pérez-Seijo, 2017; Sundar et al., 2017; Vázquez-Herrero et al., 2017; Shyam et al., 2017; Laws, 2017; Soler-Adillon, 2018; Bösch et al., 2018; Shin, 2018a; Shin, 2018b; Seo et al., 2019). Depending on the
Research motivation
Existing studies on immersive VR news have focused on two aspects, user experience and media effects. However, those studies examined mainly traditional text, 2D images, and video materials; and 360° panoramic videos or VR news without interaction. To our knowledge, a quantitative study of the user experience and media effects of interactive immersive VR news has not been undertaken. Interactivity is an essential characteristic of VR (Villani et al., 2009), and any discussion of VR excluding
Experimental design
Among the five hypotheses, H3 aims to address the evaluation of media effects such as the accuracy of information acquisition. To avoid the influence of the order of different experimental treatments on the learning effect on the subject, we adopted a between-subjects design method in which three experimental treatments, i.e., traditional video, VR without Interaction (VR-I) and VR with Interaction (VR+I), were created. For each treatment, different stimuli were used. The subjects of the
Mental model observations
In this section, based on the interview results after the trial, we discuss how the users’ mental model affects their preferences concerning different experimental treatments.
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The reasons for the subjects to support the traditional video are as follows:
• Compared to immersive VR news, it is easier to clearly observe the facial expressions of the characters and perceive and understand characters’ actual emotions in traditional video news.
• The production techniques of immersive VR news are in an
Discussion
In this section, based on the results of the experiment and user interviews, we offer design and development guidelines for immersive VR news.
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From the perspective of news topics, the cost of VR news production and consumption determines that VR news must be selectively applied to certain news types. At this stage, it seems infeasible for media organizations to pursue VR news production on a large scale. Therefore, scenes of disaster events and major historical events and scenes that are
Conclusion and future work
With the continuous development of computer hardware and software technology, immersive VR technology has made great progress and is widely used in various areas with great success such as simulation, gaming, industrial design, education, and medical care. In recent years, academic and industry researchers have attempted to combine immersive VR technology and news communication and have proposed the concept of immersive VR news. Currently, however, there is still insufficient clarity on the
CRediT authorship contribution statement
Huiyue Wu: Conceptualization, Methodology, Validation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Writing - original draft. Tong Cai: Investigation, Formal analysis. Dan Luo: Formal analysis, Validation. Yingxin Liu: Investigation, Validation. Zhian Zhang: Writing - review & editing.
Declaration of Competing Interest
No author associated with this paper has disclosed any potential or pertinent conflicts which may be perceived to have impending conflict.
Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments. This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (61772564) and the Ministry of Education Key Projects of Philosophy and Social Sciences Research (16JZD006).
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