Journalism in Virtual Reality: Opportunities and Future Research Challenges

This paper presents a state-of-the-art overview of journalism and its opportunities and challenges in virtual reality (VR). First, we examine what kind of real-life journalistic experiments have been made in this field thus far, and then we analyze the research literature on journalistic VR. We discuss the emergence of virtual reality and immersive journalism explored in the latest reports in the fields of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and VR design. To analyze VR journalism further, we develop an early draft of an analysis model based on sample of three VR productions and four VR applications. We conclude by discussing the results of the analysis and outline a more advanced and interdisciplinary research approach for studying and designing journalistic VR productions.