A Body in the Story: Exploring Body Representation, Presence and Embodiment in Virtual Reality Narratives

This chapter seeks to explore the narrative impacts of presence and embodiment in contemporary narrative-based virtual reality (VR) projects. The author questions how interactive devices and stylistic elements, including representations of virtual bodies, give rise to feelings of presence and embodiment. A formal analysis and phenomenological reading of three projects that offer various bodily representations and degrees of interaction for the participant is presented. The chapter concludes that these varying approaches have consequences for the user’s sense of identification with a predetermined character, as well as their overall narrative understanding, although the author notes the contribution of other factors in this regard.