Work-in-Progress-360-degree immersive storytelling video to create empathetic response

Hollick, M.; Acheampong, C.; Ahmed, M.; Economou, D.; Ferguson, J.

Open days are organised by Universities to give potential students the opportunity to visit the University premises, talk to staff and student ambassadors and develop a sense of how it feels to study at a University a concept difficult to convey via prospectus. Visiting open days requires the investment of personal time, travel, and expense especially if from abroad. In recent years there has been an increasing demand for open days to be delivered online. Social distancing measures imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic enforced this mode of delivery of open days as the only viable option. Many Universities created VR campuses to help students experience their campuses but lack an empathetic response in the way they fail to capture the actual vibe of a university from the human perspective. New tools such as 360-degree immersive storytelling video (VR) and 3D interactive media present new opportunities for effectively delivering open days capturing not only a realistic representation of the place, but the actual feel of a place. This paper presents work-in-progress focusing on studying if 360-degree immersive storytelling video can invoke an empathetic response. It achieves this by submerging a user in a 360-degree immersive storytelling video that effectively and realistically captures student life. This paper presents the project motivation, discusses the proposed research methodology, presents the research instruments and finishes with expected contributions to knowledge and future work. © 2021 Immersive Learning Research Network.