Virtual Realities: Immersive Documentary Encounters (VRDocs)
Exploring the production, audience and experience of nonfiction virtual reality media.
The VR Documentary Encounters project was an EPSRC-funded collaboration between Bristol, UWE, and Bath University, with industry partners including the BBC, the Guardian, Aardman, and MIT Open Documentary Lab. The project examined the production and audience experience of nonfiction VR, commissioning three original works and investigating how presence, platform, and sociality shape engagement with real-world stories in virtual environments. I worked across three work packages to deliver a series of experimental interventions and public engagement activities to explore audience response to nonfiction virtual reality. I created the virtual reality nonfiction mediography, for which I received an honorary mention award at ACM CHI2019. I also created a series of software tools to capture and visualise multivariate time series-based audience behaviour (using Unity and Python), along with the project website.
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Publications
Using Narrative 360° Video as a Tool to Promote Breast Self-examination (2024). Virtual Reality.
Did you see what I saw?: Comparing attentional synchrony during 360 degree video viewing in head mounted display and tablets (2020). Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied.
'You wouldn't get that from watching TV!': Exploring audience responses to virtual reality non-fiction in the home (2020). Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies.
Behind The Curtain Of The "Ultimate Empathy Machine": On The Composition Of Virtual Reality Nonfiction Experiences (2019). In In CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Proceedings (CHI 2019), May 4–9, 2019, Glasgow, Scotland UK.
Did You See What I Saw?: Comparing User Synchrony When Watching 360 Video In HMD Vs Flat Screen (2019). In 2019 IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces (VR).
Using Design Fiction to Explore the Ethics of VR 'In the Wild' (2019). Proceedings of the 2019 ACM International Conference on Interactive Experiences for TV and Online Video (TVX19).
What can the first years of VR nonfiction tell us about its future? Looking back on Virtual Reality nonfiction: 2012-2018 (2019). Immerse.
A Mediography Of Virtual Reality Non-Fiction: Insights And Future Directions (2018). In Proceedings of the 2018 ACM International Conference on Interactive Experiences for TV and Online Video (TVX '18).
Awards
Honorary Mention Award — ACM CHI International Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2019) (2019)
Press
Immersive VR Documentary showcases at the Venice Film Festival — University of Bath (2019).
Experience immersive VR documentaries — University of Bristol (2019).