UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Virtual reality technology may help journalists pull an audience into their stories, but they should avoid being too flashy, or their credibility could suffer, according to a team of researchers.
In a study, participants indicated that stories experienced in virtual reality — VR — significantly outperformed text-based articles in several categories, such as giving them a sense of presence, or the feeling of being there, and increasing their empathy for the story's characters, said S. Shyam Sundar, distinguished professor of communications and co-director of the Media Effects Research Laboratory. Using a cardboard VR viewer for experiencing 360-degree videos was better than interacting with the same videos on a computer screen, he added.
"VR stories provide a better sense of being right in the midst of the story than text with pictures and even 360-degree video on a computer screen," said Sundar. "This is remarkable given that we used two stories from the New York Times Magazine, which were high quality and rich in imagery even in the text version."
Although virtual reality outperformed text and video, the researchers cautioned that relying on some of the flashier design elements of virtual reality may affect credibility and cause the audience to have less trust in the story. They discovered that evoking a higher sense of "being there" was associated with lower trustworthiness ratings of the New York Times.
"What really makes people trust VR more is that it creates a greater sense of realism compared to text and that creates the trustworthiness," said Sundar. "But, if it doesn't give that sense of realism, it can affect credibility. If developers try to gamify it or make it more fantasy-like, for example, people may begin to wonder about the credibility of what they're seeing."
That said, the immersive quality of virtual reality and 360-degree video may make the content more shareable, according to the researchers, who report their findings in the current issue of Cyberpsychology, Behavior and Social Networking.