Beyond virtual cultural tourism: history-living experiences with cinematic virtual reality

Virtual reality offers unprecedented opportunities for creating cultural tourism experiences that tell visitors emotionally engaging stories about the past.  This paper focuses onthe latest frontier of immersive storytelling rivalling feature films, cinematic virtual reality, which can immerse users into 360-degree films making them feel like living the story. Through a qualitative analysis of five projects, this paper explores how this new media form has been applied for cultural heritage storytelling and analyses the reactions of users to the historyliving experiences with an emphasis on their emotional responses. Based on the findings of the analysis, implications are discussed for the design of VR experiences in cultural tourism

Effects of Character Guide in Immersive Virtual Reality Stories

Bringing cinematic experiences from traditional film screens into Virtual Reality (VR) has become an increasingly popular form of entertainment in recent years. VR provides viewers unprecedented film experience that allows them to freely explore around the environment and even interact with virtual props and characters. For the audience, this kind of experience raises their sense of presence in a different world, and may even stimulate their full immersion in story scenarios. However, different from traditional film-making, where the audience is completely passive in following along director’s decisions of storytelling, more freedom in VR might cause viewers to get lost on halfway watching a series of events that build up a story. Therefore, striking a balance between user interaction and narrative progression is a big challenge for filmmakers. To assist in organizing the research space, we presented a media review and the resulting framework to characterize the primary differences among different variations of film, media, games, and VR storytelling. The evaluation in particular provided us with knowledge that were closely associated with story-progression strategies and gaze redirection methods for interactive content in the commercial domain. Following the existing VR storytelling framework, we then approached the problem of guiding the audience through the major events of a story by introducing a virtual character as a travel companion who provides assistance in directing the viewer’s focus to the target scenes. The presented research explored a new technique that allowed a separate virtual character to be overlaid on top of an existing 360-degree video such that the added character react based on the head-tracking data to help indicate to the viewer the core focal content of the story. The motivation behind this research is to assist directors in using a virtual guiding character to increase the effectiveness of VR storytelling, assuring that viewers fully understand the story through completing a sequence of events, and possibly realize a rich literary experience. To assess the effectiveness of this technique, we performed a controlled experiment by applying the method in three immersive narrative experiences, each with a control condition that was free ii from guidance. The experiment compared three variations of the character guide: 1) no guide; 2) a guide with an art style similar to the style of the video design; and 3) a character guide with a dissimilar style. All participants viewed the narrative experiences to test whether a similar art style led to better gaze behaviors that had higher likelihood of falling on the intended focus regions of the 360-degree range of the Virtual Environment (VE). By the end of the experiment, we concluded that adding a virtual character that was independent from the narrative had limited effects on users’ gaze performances when watching an interactive story in VR. Furthermore, the implemented character’s art style made very few difference to users’ gaze performance as well as their level of viewing satisfaction. The primary reason could be due to limitation of the implementation design. Besides this, the guiding body language designed for an animal character caused certain confusion for numerous participants viewing the stories. In the end, the character guide approaches still provided insights for future directors and designers into how to draw the viewers’ attention to a target point within a narrative VE, including what can work well and what should be avoide

Immersive Movies: The Effect of Point of View on Narrative Engagement

Cinematic Virtual Reality (CVR) offers filmmakers a wide range of possibilities to explore new techniques regarding movie scripting, shooting and editing. Despite the many experiments performed so far with both live action and computer-generated movies, just a few studies focused on analyzing how these cinematic techniques actually affect the viewers’ experience. Like in traditional cinema, a key step for CVR screenwriters and directors is to choose from which perspective the viewers will see the scene, the so-called point of view (POV). The aim of this paper is to understand to what extent watching an immersive movie from a specific POV could impact the narrative engagement (NE), i.e., the viewers’ sensation of being immersed in the movie environment and being connected with its characters and story. Two POVs that are typically used in CVR, i.e., first-person perspective (1-PP) and external perspective (EP), are investigated through a user study in which both objective and subjective metrics were collected. The user study was carried out by leveraging two live action 360° short films with distinct scripts. The results suggest that the 1-PP experience could be more pleasant than the EP one in terms of overall NE and narrative presence, or even for all the NE dimensions if the potential of that POV is specifically exploited