Work

Immersive storytelling and affective ethnography in virtual reality

Year: 2021

Type: article

Abstract: Virtual Reality (VR) storytelling, particularly in its non-fictional modes, promises a sensory immersion among others whose lives and ways of being a privileged viewer might not otherwise experience. In this essay, by focusing on the Emmy-nominated 2018 VR film Traveling While Black, we explore how the immersive power of VR storytelling can enact ethnographic encounters premised less on the impulse to extract meaning from other people and their ways of life than on the sensory and affective force of being with others in an unfolding experience of both similitude and difference. Without wishing to overstate VR’s empathy-inducing potential, we suggest that by situating viewers at a paradoxical threshold between proximity and distance, the affective power of VR derives in part from a narrative form capable of fostering non- appropriative relations.

Source: Review of Communication

DOI: 10.1080/15358593.2021.1881610

Authors: Maud Ceuterick, Chris Ingraham

Institutions: University of Bergen, University of Utah

Language: English

Topic: Virtual Reality Applications and Impacts

Subfield: Human-Computer Interaction

Field: Computer Science

Domain: Physical Sciences

Open Access status: hybrid

Funders: European Commission, Horizon 2020, H2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Awards: G2162196823, G434337789, Affirmative Post-Cinema: Narrative and Aesthetic Responses to Gender and Power