There has been limited adoption of Immersive Journalism (IJ) by the audience; simultaneously, the audience’s perspective is rarely considered in the production and research of IJ. At this point, however, it is crucial to incorporate an audience perspective to identify potentially unintended effects of IJ and improve on the innovation of IJ. This study investigates the audience’s experience and evaluation of IJ by qualitatively analyzing their thoughts after viewing two IJ cases. Our results indicate that the audience may pick up on intended effects, such as a sense of presence and an intense emotional experience, but some also express unease towards these effects. Furthermore, the audience struggles to comprehend this study’s two immersive journalistic cases as part of the journalistic genre. These findings provide insight into the gap between the initial hype and the current reality of IJ and provide the basis for propositions for future IJ productions.
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Over the past years, innovative technologies (such as Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR) and Mixed Reality (MR)) have become more common within news organizations. These technologies allow users to immerse themselves in a virtual world. With these types of productions, the journalist tries to engage and involve the user by introducing emotional styles, often to create empathy. This does not only demand new technological skills, but also challenges the way journalist allow emotions in journalistic productions, and what role they take in relation to the story and the user. Through fifteen in-depth interviews with immersive producers and experts in renowned news organizations across the globe, this paper examines both the motivations of journalists who produce immersive stories, and how they seek to balance traditional journalistic norms and emotionality in them. The results show that journalists believe that emotions and facts can be compatible with journalistic production. Yet, they struggle with their role in relation to the user. Immersive journalism obliges journalists to carefully reconsider their relationship with their public. In sum, this study illuminates an ongoing professional debate on the role of emotionality, user agency, and journalistic control and autonomy.
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Immersive journalism (IJ) is often assumed to be inherently emotion-inducing. Through using inclusive technology, interaction possibilities and immersive narratives, the audience should ideally experience what feels like to be in a certain situation. However, for the most part we do not know to which extent and in what form IJ influences the experience of emotions. We wanted to investigate, whether, and if so, which characteristics of IJ are related to the experience of emotions, and which role the personality trait empathy tendency plays in this respect. This is important, as the evaluation of IJ often relies on the emotion-inducing assumption thereof. Four different experiments comparing one immersive journalistic characteristic (level of inclusion, interaction possibilities, immersive narratives) to the respective non-immersive counterpart were conducted. Results indicate that while the level of inclusion and interaction possibility increase the intensity of the experience, the immersive narrative influences the valence dimension of emotions. Additionally, empathy tendency is found to be a relevant moderator for these effects. Conclusions are threefold. First, the narrative form of IJ is key; second, the analysis of IJ needs to go beyond the level of inclusion; third, including emotions when assessing IJ is fundamental to understand its impact.
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Innovations in digital storytelling techniques have spurred on the development of new journalistic and audience practices. The production processes of interactive and immersive journalistic narratives are highly technological and require specialist knowledge of both journalism and design, and require producers to consider how audience engagement and user activity both fit into their story. The resulting narratives redefine the boundaries of what is considered a journalistic production, often requiring users to act within the story, thereby challenging the existing author-user relationship. In this chapter we discuss how the boundaries of journalism are redefined or blurred during both the production and reception processes of interactive, immersive journalism.
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The concept of immersion has been widely used for the design and evaluation of user experiences. Augmented, virtual and mixed-reality environments have further sparked the discussion of immersive user experiences and underlying requirements. However, a clear definition and agreement on design criteria of immersive experiences remains debated, creating challenges to advancing our understanding of immersive experiences and how these can be designed. Based on a multidisciplinary Delphi approach, this study provides a uniform definition of immersive experiences and identifies key criteria for the design and staging thereof. Thematic analysis revealed five key themes – transition into/out of the environment, in-experience user control, environment design, user context relatedness, and user openness and motivation, that emphasise the coherency in the user-environment interaction in the immersive experience. The study proposes an immersive experience framework as a guideline for industry practitioners, outlining key design criteria for four distinct facilitators of immersive experiences–systems, spatial, empathic/social, and narrative/sequential immersion. Further research is proposed using the immersive experience framework to investigate the hierarchy of user senses to optimise experiences that blend physical and digital environments and to study triggered, desired and undesired effects on user attitude and behaviour.
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Immersive technologies are redefining and revolutionizing the staging of experiences and co-creation of value, implicating the management of customer experiences. However, limited studies have looked at the role of immersive technologies as part of the customer experience management (CXM) process. Incorporating the concepts of experience economy and value co-creation, this study proposes a dynamic CXM framework that highlights the emerging field of immersive technologies like augmented and virtual reality as part of business and marketing research. The framework acts as a guide for researchers and industry practitioners to initiate immersive technology ventures that are rooted in the co-creation and management of customer experiences
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Major news outlets increasingly use immersive techniques in their journalistic productions. The idea is that, through the application of immersive technologies, the news consumer can engage with and be part of the story. However, we do not know, to what extent this promise is actually fulfilled in productions currently accessible to news audiences. This study uses a multi-step approach to fill this knowledge gap.
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Over the past decade, journalists have created in-depth interactive narratives to provide an alternative to the relentless 24-hour news cycle. Combining different media forms, such as text, audio, video, and data visualisation with the interactive possibilities of digital media, these narratives involve users in the narrative in new ways. In journalism studies, the convergence of different media forms in this manner has gained significant attention. However, interactivity as part of this form has been left underappreciated. In this study, we scrutinise how navigational structure, expressed as navigational cues, shapes user agency in their individual explorations of the narrative. By approaching interactive narratives as story spaces with unique interactive architectures, in this article, we reconstruct the architecture of five Dutch interactive narratives using the walkthrough method. We find that the extensiveness of the interactive architectures can be described on a continuum between closed and open navigational structures that predetermine and thus shape users’ trajectories in diverse ways.
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Virtual Humans within Journalism: an overview of examples, possibilities and questions.
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