Recently, a proliferation of mobile technologies has created new ways of interacting, interpreting, and consuming media. Simple text types have suddenly become less common than complex, rich, multimodal modes of communication (Bezemir & Kress, 2008, p. 172). The rapid pace of development has led us from traditional videos to rich, immersive, virtual reality (VR) experiences. Virtual reality isa means of enabling people to supplant their surroundings with another environment by replacing their visual, audio and other sensory inputs with those generated by a computer. VR has the potential to transform media into an immersive domain, wherein the user has presence— “a state of consciousness, the (psychological) sense of being in the virtual environment” (Slater & Wilbur, 1997, p. 4). One of the easiest ways to experience a virtual environment is through 360° videos, which allow users to not just passively view content, but rather to interact with it by directing their gaze wherever they choose.
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