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

Cinematic Virtual Reality (Cinematic VR, or CVR) gives a wide range of possibilities to experiment new techniques regarding movie editing, narrative and shooting. This includes both live action and computer generated movies. Many filmmakers proposed different solutions to tackle the above domain, but still a few scientific studies were made to investigate their efficiency and to analyze how different approaches affect our experience. As for traditional cinema, one of the choices that a CVR director has to make is to select from which perspective the user will see the movie, the so-called point of view (POV). Taking in consideration the actual products related to CVR, the types of POVs can be roughly split in first-person perspective (1-PP) and external observer. In the 1-PP approach, the user is a diegetic element of the story, a character or even an object; conversely, in the external observer approach, the user watches the scene from an objective point of view, untied from any element of the story. The aim of this study is to understand if watching a VR movie from a specific POV can actually affect the narrative engagement, i.e. the user’s sensation of being immersed in the movie environment and being connected with its characters and story. The main hypothesis of this thesis is that the 1-PP version might be more engaging, especially in terms of emotional engagement and narrative presence. In the interest of isolating the POV as variable, two live action 360° videos were produced in two different versions. A user study was conducted where the participants, after watching one version of each video in VR, had to fill in a questionnaire aimed to evaluate the narrative engagement. Additionally, eye tracking data were collected to correlate the subjective experience with objective observations.