Reading in virtual reality

A prototype designed to test whether reading in VR increases narrative absorption and intention to read.

– 2018 –

with Katalin Bálint (VU Amsterdam) and Jessica Weller (postgraduate student)

I conceptualised and designed the user experience of a virtual reality app for reading. I co-designed the experiment to test whether VR increases narrative absorption, empathy for the characters, and intention to read. It does, but the effect size is very small.

Tools and skills

Aframe VR, HTML, Mozilla VR browser, SPSS

Concept, user experience design, content curation, deployment, ANCOVA, MANCOVA, mediation analysis

Outputs

Pianzola, Federico, Katalin Bálint, and Jessica Weller. 2019. “Virtual Reality as a Tool for Promoting Reading via Enhanced Narrative Absorption and Empathy”. Scientific Study of Literature 9.2: 162–93.

Code and demo: https://github.com/fedormyskin/AliceVR

Data: https://zenodo.org/record/3706937#.YDF5kC9Q36A