Body Epistemes

Abstract

This research concerns the relationships among space, story, and body in nonfictional Virtual Reality (VR) projects with the user as a first-person protagonist. What was once called immersive journalism (i.e., attempting to offer users physical experiences of factual journalism) has become increasingly film-oriented over the last five years with the further development of head-mounted displays for the consumer market. As such, projects often tell stories that relate to reality and allow protagonists to enter realistic narratives. Mel Slater has investigated VR projects since 2005, analyzing factors such as place illusion (PI) and plausibility illusion (Psi). In later writings, Slater expanded his research to include the body-oriented sense of embodiment (SoE) (Slater 2009; Slater et al. 2010; De La Pena et al. 2010; Kilteni et al. 2012). Since nonfictional VR mostly tells a story in the direction of the users, incorporating them into the story design, the effects of narration also should be considered. Domenic Arsénault (2005) noted three levels of narrative immersion in VR when dealing with narrative projects. Considering this, it is possible to develop a four-level matrix including place, plausibility, body perception, and narration. Starting in 2020, a Graduate student research project at the University of Leipzig was set up using this matrix to analyse four current examples for a small, non-representative study of twenty-four participants. Our findings demonstrate that space and story in first-person VR experiences are very important, while the installation of plausibility and coherence is less significant. The connecting factor of these two levels is one's own body. Users read, experience, and understand projects with their senses, perceptions, and cognition, making a discussion of an episteme of the body possible. Thus, stories from real life are not conveyed indirectly but experienced directly and personally.