An Exploratory Study for Designing Social Experience of Watching VR Movies Based on Audience’s Voice Comments

Social experience is important when audience are watching movies. Virtual reality (VR) movies engage audience through immersive environment and interactive narrative. However, VR headsets restrict audience to an individual experience, which disrupt the potential for shared social realities. In our study, we propose an approach to design an asynchronous social experience that allows the participant to receive other audiences’ voice comments (such as their opinions, impressions or emotional reactions) in VR movies. We measured the participants’ feedback on their engagement levels, recall abilities and social presence. The results showed that in VR-Voice Comment (VR-VC) movie, the audience’s voice comments could affect participant’s engagement and the recall of information in the scenes. The participants obtained social awareness and enjoyment at the same time. A few of them were worried mainly because of the potential auditory clutter that resulted from unpredictable voice comments. We discuss the design implications for this and directions for future research. Overall, we observe a positive tendency in watching VR-VC movie, which could be adapted for future VR movie experience.