The Three Pillars of Virtual Reality? Investigating the Roles of Immersion, Presence, and Interactivity

Virtual reality (VR) technologies enable a new media consumption experience. Although VR’s origins trace back at least to the 1960s, it is still unclear how VR’s postulated key features immersion, presence, and interactivity contribute to that experience. Furthermore, it is unclear whether flow as a construct closely related to immersion offers explanatory power in investigating VR. On the basis of a quantitative survey in a VR center with 294 participants, I analyze the interplay of the key features and exemplify their influence in a VR context by relating them to satisfaction with the VR experience. Using a flow-based conceptualization of immersion, I find that presence as well as interactivity contribute to immersion. In addition, interactivity contributes to presence. Furthermore, my results show that immersion influences satisfaction with a VR experience, indicating that a flow-based conceptualization of immersion is a suitable predictor in VR contexts

Immersion, Presence, Interactivity: Towards a Joint Understanding of Factors Influencing Virtual Reality Acceptance and Use

Virtual Reality (VR) has started to diffuse into the market. Research can accompany this process by providing insights into adoption of the technology. However, although first studies have been conducted early, there are few empirical findings shedding light on issues of acceptance and use of VR. This is because the used models often suffer from omissions or only partially cover important variables for distinct characteristics of the technology, especially immersion, presence, and interactivity. Additionally, the applied variables are occasionally incorrectly specified. To lay a better foundation for investigating adoption and diffusion of VR, we explore relevant influence factors based on insights from previous works and a qualitative study with 20 participants. Besides issues of misspecification, our findings show that many contextual factors have been neglected. Moreover, we identify content quality, initial excitement, isolation, and distraction as new potentially relevant factors

Specifics of Collaboration in Virtual Reality: How Immersion Drives the Intention to Collaborate

Collaborative virtual reality (VR) is increasingly receiving attention, but the effects of context- specific variables and the interplay of telepresence, interactivity, and immersion as VR’s distinctive characteristics in such settings are little understood. Besides these three VR characteristics, we investigate in a quantitative study with 102 participants the influence of social presence, i.e. the sense of community; media naturalness, or the similarity of communication to face-to-face-interaction; and trust between users. Based on partial least squares structural equation modeling, we confirm the importance of interactivity and immersion, but not of telepresence. Moreover, we find that trust is essential for collaborative VR experiences, but social presence and media naturalness seem negligible. Finally, we show that immersion is a main driver of users’ intention to collaborate. Besides providing practitioners with insights for creating VR experiences, our study highlights that findings from research on individual VR use are not readily transferable to collaborative contexts

Making Sense of Digital Innovations: The Role of the Material Artefact

Users’ perceptions of a material artefact hold important implications of how they make sense of a digital innovation, expressed in their technological frames about the innovation. Yet, research on sensemaking offers little insights on the role of the material artefact for shaping users’ technological frames. This paper proposes a 2x2 experiment to investigate how newness as a crucial aspect of the material artefact influences users’ frames. Based on theories of resonance, we assume that this effect is mediated by cognitive and emotional resonance. We manipulate the technical and design newness of smart speakers to investigate our research model. Our findings contribute to research on technology sensemaking by illuminating the role of the newness of the material artefact. For developers, our results indicate how users’ understanding can be shaped by embodying familiar and non-familiar cues in digital innovations

Believing Journalists, AI, or Fake News: The Role of Trust in Media

An increasing amount of news is generated automatically by artificial intelligence (AI). While the technology has advantages for content production, e.g., regarding efficiency in aggregating information, it is also viewed critically due to little transparency in obtaining results and possible biases. As news media are dependent on trust and credibility, introducing AI to facilitate mass communication with consumers seems to be a risky endeavor. We expand research on consumer perception of AI-based news by comparing machine-written and human-written texts to fake news and by examining the role of trust that consumers exhibit when evaluating news. Through an experiment with 263 participants, we find that consumers judge AI-based texts similar to true journalistic content when it comes to credibility, but similar to fake news regarding readability. Furthermore, our results indicate that consumers with low trust in media are less averse to AI-based texts than consumers with high trust in media

EXPLORING THE IMPACTS OF VIRTUAL REALITY ON BUSINESS MODELS: THE CASE OF THE MEDIA INDUSTRY

Virtual reality (VR) is an emerging technology with a large potential to disrupt businesses. However, impacts of VR on companies have remained largely unexplored. We seek to fill this research gap with the business model concept as a well-structured foundation. Using the example of the media industry as one of the industries most affected by VR, our qualitative study classifies different types of VR applications and contents to assess their impacts on a business model’s components. We distinguish be-tween the internal use of VR applications in companies (e.g., for conferencing and collaborating) and the production and distribution of VR content for external use (e.g., videos and games). The findings show that the impact of VR on companies that produce and distribute VR contents for external purposes is large and even increases when more technologies are needed to create content and when the con-tent is more interactive. Compared to this, VR’s impact on companies that merely use the technology for internal purposes is small. Our analysis also shows that the business model concept is well suited to analyze technology adoption at the firm level. Thus, we suggest its future use to methodically ad-vance this research stream

Digital Technologies and Their Influence on Spaces

While spaces are an important theoretical concept in various research fields, the influence of digitalization on spaces is unclear. Owing to their unique characteristics, digital technologies may shape spaces differently, limiting the applicability of existing theories. To examine whether this is in fact the case, we conduct a systematic literature review, revealing that digital technologies lead to what we call “digital spaces”. These are digitally open, i.e. they use digital technologies to blur boundaries between themselves and other physical or virtual spaces. Based on this insight, we provide an agenda for further research on digital spaces covering empirical validation; development of a digital spaces theory; methodical approaches to analyze digital spaces; design, constitution, reconfiguration, and discontinuance of digital spaces; interplay of different sub-spaces and boundaries in a digital space; shape and role of boundaries in digital spaces; and technologies in digital spaces

Organizational Choices and Venturing Modes: An Analysis of Corporate Venture Capital Activities in Legacy Media

Traditional media companies increasingly search for know-how and novel input outside their own networks to keep up with the rapidly changing environment. As an instrument to explore and exploit new business opportunities, corporate venture capital (CVC) has become particularly important. However, there is little research on the CVC investments by legacy media companies, despite these having been responsible for some of the largest investments in past years. To lay a foundation for research in this field, we investigate how traditional media companies organize their CVC activities. Using an extensive analysis of the 90 largest legacy media companies in Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States, we explore the organizational structure, investment objectives, investment focus, and industry related- ness of investments. Our findings show the majority of investments are conducted through different forms of direct investments, predominantly focusing on strategic goals and using both exploration and exploitation. Moreover, we identify a trend toward investments in content- and commerce-related fields