‘What Are They Looking at?’ Testing the Capacity of Action Units to Direct Attention in a 360° Recorded Virtual Reality Narrative

Virtual Reality (VR) creates immersion, which makes the medium interesting for storytelling. A good VR narrative brings the audiences close to the stories, placing them inside the story world and in the shoes of the characters themselves. Focused attention is a key component of narrative engagement and a key determinant of enjoyment of the narrative. However, as the audience can freely look around in VR, it is a challenge to draw audience attention to key aspects of the narrative at the right moment. This paper compared two techniques of directing attention in a 360° narrative: diegetic (Action Units) versus non-diegetic (Pointing Arrows). A between-subjects experiment among 71 participants revealed an effect opposite to what was expected. Pointing Arrows provided more control to direct attention in VR, which created more enjoyment compared to Action Units. This effect was confirmed by subjective (self-report) and objective (eye-tracking data) measurements.