This article examines the impact of augmented reality (AR) visualizations on users’ sense of physical presence, knowledge gain, and perceptions of the authenticity of journalistic visuals. In a mixed experimental design, 79 participants were randomly assigned to view three The New York Times articles on a mobile phone featuring one of three viewing modalities: (1) AR visualizations, (2) interactive (non-AR) visualizations, or (3) non-interactive, static visualizations. AR induced a greater sense of physical presence compared to the other modalities. The findings suggest that immersive properties of AR can contribute to journalism’s goal of engaging the audience. However, AR was not a superior medium for informing the participants, and the viewing modality did not have an effect on the perceived authenticity of the visuals. The findings indicate a need for more efficient ways to relay information through journalistic AR visualizations while keeping the user engaged in an immersive experience.

This article focuses on consumer immersion and explores how interactions with the experiencescape can influence the immersion process. The study presented in this article is explorative in nature and utilize a grounded theory approach. Data was collected through a combination of participant observation and semi-structured interviews with visitors participating in themed sailing trips offered at the Roskilde Viking Ship Museum in Denmark. Data analysis revealed three distinct stages in the immersion process: "involvement triggers", "involvement words" and "state of immersion". Each stage was connected to an increasingly higher level of involvement. Findings further indicated that the visitors' progression through the immersion process was dynamic and appeared to be moderated by the visitors' individual reactions to the incidents that occurred during the experience. This article provides new insights into the nature of the immersion process that have practical and theoretical implications for attraction management as well as experience design.

While a consumer revolution in virtual reality (VR) has piqued the interest of many fields, industries, and professions, it is unclear when, how, and to what degree the technology can elicit empathy. To better understand how the relationship between VR and empathy is communicated and defined, we performed qualitative and quantitative thematic analyses on popular ( N = 640) and academic articles ( N = 53) that included both terms. Findings revealed empathy is an aspirational term for journalists and researchers to showcase the potential of immersive media for prosocial change. Writers in both corpora suggested that empathetic experiences could lead to prosocial action through VR, but do not consistently define or measure empathy, given the inherent complexities surrounding the term. Drawing on seminal research in the field, we conclude with a definition of empathy related to immersive media.

This collaborative research between a team of digital technology developers and academic researchers investigates how social interaction affects visitors' experience during a virtual reality (VR) underwater seascape exploration. Prior research in immersive VR focused more on individual perceptions of immersion, interactive features and enjoyment. Analysis of focus-group discussions revealed three categories of immersion, interaction with the virtual environment (VE) and social interaction salient to satisfaction with the experience. Moderated mediation analysis of survey results from a full-scale trial (N = 234) show that the three variables had a significant role in experience satisfaction and loyalty intentions. Specifically, immersion mediates person-VE interaction effects on satisfaction and loyalty. The results contrast with previous findings from online gaming contexts, showing that social interactions decrease the impact of immersion on satisfaction and loyalty. We call for caution in the positioning and communication of VR experiences and for further research in other settings.

360 video is considered an “empathy machine,” in part because it places audiences in the perspective of the other. Despite its popularity, its influence on empathy is not fully understood. Two possible mechanisms driving empathy within 360 video are social presence (sense of being with others) and interactivity (degree of control over media content). To elucidate how 360 videos can encourage empathic outcomes through these factors, a 2 (social presence: high/low) × 2 (interactivity: high/low) between-subjects experiment ( N = 110) was conducted testing 360 videos about Alaskan climate change refugees. Results demonstrate that social presence contributes to prosocial behaviors (donations) through empathic concern, an effect augmented by interactivity. Unexpectedly, the social presence manipulation also contributed to greater perceived interactivity. Collectively, results are promising and elucidate the role of social presence and interactivity in immersive storytelling.

How does our brain organize knowledge? Traditional theories assume that our knowledge is represented abstractly in an amodal conceptual network of formal logic symbols. The theory of embodied cognition challenges this view and argues that conceptual representations that constitute our knowledge are grounded in sensory and motor experiences. We tested this hypothesis by examining how the concept of social coordination is grounded metaphorically in the tactile sensation of roughness. Participants experienced rough or smooth touch before being asked to judge an ambiguous social interaction. Results revealed that rough touch made social interactions appear more difficult and adversarial, consistent with the rough metaphor. This impact of tactile cues on social impressions was accompanied by a network including primary and secondary somatosensory cortices, amygdala, hippocampus and inferior prefrontal cortex. Thus, the roughness of tactile stimulation affected metaphor-relevant (but not metaphor-irrelevant) behavioral and neural responses. Receiving touch from a rough object seems to trigger the application of associated ontological concepts (or scaffolds) even for unrelated people and situations (but not to unrelated or more general feelings). Since this priming was based on somatosensory brain areas, our results provide support for the theory that sensorimotor grounding is intrinsic to cognitive processes. © The Author (2013). Published by Oxford University Press. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com.

Ultra-high definition television (UHDTV) is designed using a variety of immersive technologies that are believed to promote user engagement. This study examines the immersion feature of UHDTV by focusing on user experience (UX) to determine whether there is a favorable response by users and whether immersion improves their viewing experience. Further, it examines the relationship between UX and the quality perception of UHDTV to develop a conceptual model for users' quality of experience (QoE) with respect to UHDTV. It uses multiple methods combining experiment (to measure the effect of the immersive experience) and survey (to model the UHDTV UX). The results imply an optimum level of immersion as well as the need for user-based quality measurement. The results confirm the existing models of predicting user intentions with digital technologies and have potential to provide new insights to the research of immersive technologies.

Although virtual reality (VR) has been widely used to deliver news stories in immersive journalism (IJ), it is not clear how people are actually experiencing these stories and their contexts. Focusing on the immersion feature of VR stories, this study explicates the user experience to determine what it is like to experience news stories in VR and how immersion improves viewing experiences in IJ. This study proposes a VR experience model in the IJ context that integrates cognitive, affective, and behavioral factors as the primary influencing determinants. The results indicate that the meaning of immersion strongly depends on the users’ traits and contexts and that the function of immersion is strongly determined by the users’ own cognition and intentions. VR stories are viewed and accepted based on the manner that users imagine and intend to experience them. The model demonstrates the users’ cognitive processes of experiencing quality, value, and satisfaction, which determine how people empathize with and embody VR stories. The results confirm the relationship between immersion and both empathy and embodiment, implying a new conceptualization of immersion in the IJ context.

The effectiveness of virtual environments (VEs) has often been linked to the sense of presence reported by users of those VEs. (Presence is defined as the subjective experience of being in one place or environment, even when one is physically situated in another.) We believe that presence is a normal awareness phenomenon that requires directed attention and is based in the interaction between sensory stimulation, environmental factors that encourage involvement and enable immersion, and internal tendencies to become involved. Factors believed to underlie presence were described in the premier issue of Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments. We used these factors and others as the basis for a presence questionnaire (PQ) to measure presence in VEs. In addition we developed an immersive tendencies questionnaire (ITQ) to measure differences in the tendencies of individuals to experience presence. These questionnaires are being used to evaluate relationships among reported presence and other research variables. Combined results from four experiments lead to the following conclusions: the PQ and ITQ are internally consistent measures with high reliability; there is a weak but consistent positive relation between presence and task performance in VEs; individual tendencies as measured by the ITQ predict presence as measured by the PQ; and individuals who report more simulator sickness symptoms in VE report less presence than those who report fewer symptoms.