Immersive movies: the effect of point of view on narrative engagement

AI & SOCIETY https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-022-01622-9 OPEN FORUM Immersive movies: the effect of point of view on narrative engagement Alberto Cannavò1 · Antonio Castiello1 · F. Gabriele Pratticò1 · Tatiana Mazali2 · Fabrizio Lamberti1 Received: 28 July 2022 / Accepted: 21 December 2022 © The Author(s) 2023 Abstract Cinematic virtual reality (CVR) offers filmmakers a wide range of possibilities to explore new techniques regarding movie scripting, shooting and editing. Despite the many experiments performed so far both with both live action and computergenerated movies, just a few studies focused on analyzing how the various techniques actually affect the viewers’ experience. Like in traditional cinema, a key step for CVR screenwriters and directors is to choose from which perspective the viewers will see the scene, the so-called point of view (POV). The aim of this paper is to understand to what extent watching an immersive movie from a specific POV could impact the narrative engagement (NE), i.e., the viewers’ sensation of being immersed in the movie environment and being connected with its characters and story. Two POVs that are typically used in CVR, i.e., first-person perspective (1-PP) and external perspective (EP), are investigated through a user study in which both objective and subjective metrics were collected. The user study was carried out by leveraging two live action 360° short films with distinct scripts. The results suggest that the 1-PP experience could be more pleasant than the EP one in terms of overall NE and narrative presence, or even for all the NE dimensions if the potential of that POV is specifically exploited. Keywords Omnidirectional · 360° · Immersive videos · Cinematic VR · First-person perspective · External perspective · User study 1 Introduction The release of an ever-growing number of commercial headmounted displays (HMDs) like the Oculus Quest 2 and the HTC Vive Pro, together with the development of solutions * Alberto Cannavò * Fabrizio Lamberti Antonio Castiello F. Gabriele Pratticò Tatiana Mazali 1 Politecnico di Torino, Dipartimento di Automatica e Informatica, Corso Duca Degli Abruzzi 24, 10129 Turin, Italy 2 Politecnico di Torino, Dipartimento Interateneo di Scienze, Progetto e Politiche del Territorio, Viale Pier Andrea Mattioli, 39, 10125 Turin, Italy enabling affordable virtual experiences like the Google Cardboard, is promoting the interest in VR for home entertainment (Moghadam and Ragan 2017). The popularity of this medium has stimulated the growth of new interactive narratives for entertainment purposes (Stebbins and Ragan 2019). More and more immersive cinematic experiences are produced by VR companies (like, e.g., Baobab Studios1 and Immersive Studios2) as short stories or movies, opening new opportunities to experiment with alternative approaches to storytelling and user interaction within the developed experiences (Stebbins and Ragan 2019). Immersive movies started to be produced in Computer Graphics by making use of animation suites (such as Blender and Maya) or game engines (like Unity or Unreal Engine), and as live actions, i.e., as recordings of real-world scenes captured with 360° cameras like the GoPro Max or the Samsung Gear 360. However, there is a lack in the research literature and among practitioners for what it concerns the experience and/or the expectation of the users when they watch immersive movies (Marañes et al. 2020). 1 2 Baobab Studios: https://www.baobabstudios.com/. Immersive Studios: https://weareimmersive.co.uk/. 13 Vol.:(0123456789) AI & SOCIETY Differently than with traditional movies in which a wellestablished cinematographic language was developed over a century of continuous developments, the production of immersive movies is still undergoing an initial phase made up of experimentations (Marañes et al. 2020). For this reason, both researchers and content creators are still working on developing a new narrative language that is able to improve the effectiveness of the VR medium to leverage its full potential (Marañes et al. 2020; Stebbins and Ragan 2019; Sitzmann 2018; Xue et al. 2021). Among the various research directions to be explored in this context, the point of view (POV) is becoming of paramount importance, since it represents the perspective from which the viewers perceive the story, and it can affect what they actually experience (in terms of both images and sounds). In traditional cinema, the director is in charge of defining the scenes’ POV by choosing the positions of the camera during the shots (Marañes et al. 2020). However, in VR, the cameras are controlled/worn by the viewers, who can freely decide where to look in the 360° scene. As a result, the viewers may not look in the direction where the main narrative actions are taking place. According to the taxonomy reported in (Ruscella and Obeid 2021), it is possible to identify two main POVs in CVR, which the authors refer to as two levels of embodiment, i.e., the perceived distance between the viewer (the VR user, in this case), and the experience. The first level, in this paper referred to as external perspective, or EP in short, refers to a sort of detached view, in which the viewer observes the scene from a disembodied POV. The viewer feels as part of the experience, but he or she is like an external observer of the actions happening in the environment. In this case, the camera is settled in the position that the director considers the best one for watching the movie, and it is allowed to make some smooth movements (like in traditional movies). An example of the EP view setup is provided by the movie “Help”.3 The second level of embodiment offered by immersive movies relies on a first-person view of the scene (in the following referred to as 1-PP, or first-person perspective). In this case, the viewer observes the scene from a diegetic element of the environment, i.e., a character or an object of the story. To record live actions with this level of embodiment, cameras are worn by the actors at eye level or are mounted onto an object in the scene. Examples of using the 1-PP are, e.g., the movies “The party—A virtual experience of autism”4 and “Car crash experience in VR”.5 Despite the numerous examples of immersive movies exploiting these POVs (in some cases also combined), 3 4 5 Help: https://bit.ly/3BsFjDa. The party: http://youtu.be/OtwOz1GVkDg. Car crash experience in VR: http://youtu.be/aBiNNgfB7jI. 13 evidence or studies that show how the POV can affect the viewers’ experience in CVR are still scarce. This paper tries to take some steps forward in this direction by focusing, in particular, on the impact on narrative engagement (NE). In (Busselle and Bilandzic 2009), the NE is described as the consequence of a mental representation, the mental model, of the story created by the viewers, who are completely posing their attentional focus on the story itself. According to (Busselle and Bilandzic (...truncated)