Use of virtual reality and 360° video as narrative resources in the documentary genre: Towards a new immersive social documentary?

Abstract

Virtual reality and 360° video are some of the latest technological developments within the media and communications industry. These technologies, which are designed to facilitate viewer immersion, are currently being used to create fictional and non-fictional content, thus giving rise to a new audio-visual narrative. On the basis of these premises, this research article analyses how immersive narratives are applied to the social documentary genre in its social dimension. To this end, qualitative content analysis was performed on a sample of 49 immersive documentaries published on the WITHIN platform. This analysis, which was completed with quantitative data, allowed us to confirm that these technologies have enabled the development of immersive narratives, which has given birth to a new type of documentary – the ‘immersive social documentary’.