From Cinema To Virtual Reality. A Phenomenological Approach To The Experience of Immersive Documentaries

From cinema to virtual reality
A phenomenological approach to the experience of immersive

documentaries
Name Sarah Tavares Barbosa
Student ID # 6112936
E-mail address s.tavaresbarbosa@student.maastrichtuniversity.nl
Course code MCU4800
Group number 00
Supervisor/tutor Jack Post
Assignment name Final Thesis
[Abstract]
[Status]
Academic year 20152016
Date 31-8-2016
Words 25.269
Table of contents
1. Abstract………………...…………………………………………………………….……..2
2. Introduction………………………………………………………………………....………3
3. Methodology………..………………………………………………………….….………..8
3.1. Building familiarity with immersive documentaries……….………..………….……8
3.2. Phenomenology and the lived experience of immersive documentaries…….…10
4. From cinema to virtual reality: the technological transition……..………………14
4.1. Immersion and illusion in the cinematic experience………....……………………14
4.2. Virtual Reality: How is it used by the cinema industry?......................................17
4.2.1. Active embodiment………….....……………………………………..……….19
4.2.2. Spatiality of the display………………………………………………….…….21
4.2.3. Transparency of the medium…………………………………………………22
4.2.4. Alternative embodiment……………………………………………………….24
4.3. Immersion, interactivity and illusion in the experience of immersive movies…..27
5. From cinema to virtual reality: The perceptional differences…...……….………33
5.1. The sense of presence in cinematic experiences…………………………………33
5.2. The sense of presence in virtual reality experiences……………………………..38
6. The real and the virtual in the transition from cinema to virtual reality…..……44
6.1. Cinema and the documentary representation of reality……………………...…...45
6.2. Virtual reality and the illusion of reality……………………………………………..50
7. The subjective meanings of the experiences of immersive documentaries…..54
7.1. Case study 1 – Witness 360: 7/7……………………………………………………55
7.2. Case study 2 – The Displaced………………………………………………………57
7.3. Case study 3 – Reframe Iran………………………………………………………..59
7.4. The feelings triggered in the experience of immersive documentaries…….…...60
8. Conclusion…………………………………….....…………………………..…………...64
9. References………………………………………………………………………………...66
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1. Abstract
Virtual reality technology has been developed over the last sixty years, but only recently
it became cheap enough to become accessible to the population. Among the majority of
game-related content that is being produced for virtual reality devices, the production of
documentaries that can be experienced with head-mounted devices is also becoming
relevant. With these documentaries come big claims about the power of virtual reality as
a machine that triggers emotions in the audience and that has the power to change the
world. Through the use of a phenomenological approach that does not accept this
determinism of the technology upon the lived experiences, I will argue that all the
different aspects that constitute the experiences of documentaries produced with virtual
reality technology are equally important for the full comprehension of the meanings
behind the experiences. This study will conclude, then, that the emotions triggered by
the experiences of virtual reality documentaries are the result from a complex and
dynamic relation between the body, the technology and the world, not from a
technological imposition.
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2. Introduction
Nearly 60 million people around the world have been driven away from their homes by
war and persecution – more than at any times since World War II. Half of them are
children. The only reason why I know this information is because it is displayed as a title
in front of me, as I am about to watch the stories of three of these kids in a documentary
called The Displaced. In one of the initial scenes, I see a young boy looking at the
camera with a mixture of anger and sadness in his eyes. This is Chuol, inform the
subtitles, which also tell me that he and his grandmother had to fled in the swamp. The
image fades to black and I start listening to his voice, speaking an unrecognizable
language that is translated by the subtitles. He is telling me the story about the getaway,
about how they were surrounded by crocodiles, and about how they lost his mother
during the escape. Another image slowly fades in, and now I can see the swamp. Chuol
is pushing the boat, which gradually starts to move. The boy softly gets inside and starts
guiding the small vessel. I see all of this as if my vision was the vision of the camera, as
if I was siting inside of the boat, where the camera is positioned. In fact, I can do more
than just passively stare at this scene: If I turn my head to the left, I can see the green
bush passing by; the clear sky is shown if I look up, and if I l move my body in 180-
degrees, it feels like I am at one of the edges of the boat, sailing away while Chuol
conducts us to some unknown destination.
The experience of exploring images and sounds in 360-degrees, of feeling like part
of the scene, is made possible by a virtual reality device, a head-mounted display that
tracks the movements of the head, allowing the control of the angle of the images. This
type of device positions the screen only a few centimeters away from the eyes, and
isolates the vision and the audition from the external world. There is no frame limiting
the image. All that is seen and heard refer to the content that comes from the medium.
For many years, virtual reality devices have been restricted to only a small part of the
population, mostly for research purposes. Recently, companies like Oculus, Samsung
and Google have launched more affordable devices like the Samsung Gear VR and the
Google Cardboard, both devices that are quickly getting popular among users. Through
these devices, people can now access experiences like The Displaced, the
documentary described above. Through experiences like this one, people can feel like
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they are immersed in another reality. In an emblematic speaking, Chris Milk (2015),
producer of The Displaced and of many other immersive documentaries, coined virtual
reality as a machine capable of triggering deep emotions in the audience as it puts the
viewers in the place of other people, acting straight into the consciousness. For him,
virtual reality is a technology that has great potential for changing the world as it
connects humans to other humans in a profound way that was never seen before in any
other type of media.
Questionings concerning how virtual reality technology affects the audience are also
present in academic discussions. For instance, studies focused on this subject are
being conducted by research labs like the MIT Open Documentary Lab, the Virtual
Human Interaction Lab from Stanford University, as well as by the Interactive Media
Arts department from the University of Southern California, among others. In a recent
interview to Henry Jenkins, William Uricchio (2016), professor at the MIT and at the
Utrecht University, and part of the board of the MIT Open Documentary Lab, talked
about how immersion can make people react differently to the facts that are presented,
with less indifference, sometimes going further than just passively absorbing the
content. In his words,
Immersion can offer a counterweight to indifference. It can lure us into

being interested in a topic we might otherwise gloss over, can encourage
a search for facts, or a desire to learn. Rational debate, as a mode of
discourse, is usually driven by some sort of motive. Immersion can help to
create that motive, but – at least until we develop better ways of shaping
and directing immersive experiences – it is not, in itself, a mode of
discourse (quoted on Jenkins, 2016).
Uricchio also mentions that one of the big issues in the experiences of immersive
documentaries is how they can change the way people process the experience, from a
representation of reality to a real-world experience of reality. For Sandra Gaudenzi
(2016), co-director of I-Docs, a research initiative from the Digital Cultures Research
Centre at UWE Bristol, the role of the audience in immersive documentaries is still
blurred between being a simply “viewer” and an “interactor”. For them, viewers are
“disembodied observers with turning headsets”, asked to have empathy for what they
see.
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In all these statements, the role of the technology is put as a determinant factor in
the process of absorbing the content that is presented by immersive documentaries.
This is a top-down imposition of the technology in which the role of the body is
neglected in the process of making sense of the experiences we live. This is a
determinist perspective that is broadly questioned by authors from the
phenomenological tradition like Don Ihde and Vivian Sobchack. For Ihde (1990), who
developed a phenomenology focused on how technology mediates our experience of
the world, the relationship between people, the media, and the world, is a dynamic
relationship in which all the elements plays significant roles. As for Vivian Sobchack
(2006), researchers in media studies need to get acquainted to where they stand in the
world, otherwise their thoughts about the world will have no existential grounds from
which to empirically proceed. In her phenomenology, Sobchack (2004) deals with the
neglected role of the perceiving and affected body in the experience of film. In her
words: “this is a bottom-up emergence of aesthetic and ethical sense as it is written by
carnal experiences on – and as – our bodies rather than a top-down and idealist
imposition on them” (p.3).
Taking into account this phenomenological tradition that puts under questioning
determinist points of view, before the theorization about the effects that the new
practices involving virtual reality and documentaries have in the audience it is first
necessary to take into consideration an existential approach that helps the
understanding of what the experience of these new documentaries are like. The
research present in this thesis aims to contribute to these discussions by assuming the
importance of the role of the body in the process of making sense of the experiences of
immersive documentaries. In order to do so, the research will aim to answer the
following questions: What are the experiences of immersive documentaries like?
And how does virtual reality technology influences the emotions in the audience
in the experience of immersive documentaries? In order to answer these questions,
phenomenology will be taken into account not only as a philosophical theory that
reflects upon the mediated relationships between people and the world, but also as a
research method that helps to understand the meanings of the experience as we live it.
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Virtual reality devices are becoming popular, but this is still a recent process. The
access to this type of experience is restricted to people who own a device like the
Samsung Gear VR or the Google Cardboard. As I did not have access to none of these
devices during the conduction of the research, and as I needed to become familiar to
these new practices, a partially ethnographical approach was taken in the beginning of
the research in order to inform the phenomenological inquiry. Among other things, the
participation in festivals dedicated to virtual reality allowed me to experience quite a few
immersive documentaries, among which three were selected for the phenomenological
analysis. The combination of these two research methods will be detailed in the next
chapter. Although phenomenology does not give space for generalizations or effectual
conclusions, the use of this method gave the possibility to explore the experiences in a
subjective and detailed way that gave insights about the broader meaning and
significance of the experience of immersive documentaries.
The phenomenological perspective adopted in this thesis lead to the argument that
all the different aspects that constitute the experiences of documentaries produced with
virtual reality technology are equally important for the full comprehension of the
meanings behind the experiences. This study concludes, then, that the emotions
triggered by the experiences of virtual reality documentaries are the result from a
complex and dynamic relation between the body, the technology and the world, not from
a technological imposition. This thesis is organized in chapters that progressively help
to build these arguments.
In the next chapter there is an explanation of how this research was conducted using
phenomenology as a method – a phenomenology that was partially informed by
ethnographical practices. Then we will follow to the sequence of chapters that will
provide a combination of theories and descriptions of selected experiences in order to
contextualize immersive documentaries as experiences involving the self, the media
and the world. Chapter four will focus on the technological transition from cinema to
virtual reality and will clarify the role of the technology in the experience of immersive
documentaries. In the sequence, chapter five will approach the role of the body in the
experience of immersive documentaries and how it perceives the sense of presence
that is characteristic from the use of virtual reality technology. The sixth chapter will
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focus on the complex relations between the real and the virtual and how they are lived
in the experience of immersive documentaries. Finally, chapter seven will complement
the analysis with a discussion of the subjective meanings found in the experiences of
three selected cases, and how different emotions were triggered by the lived experience
of the three immersive documentaries. In chapter eight, the research question will be
answered and concluding thoughts will be presented. In the last part will be listed all the
references used in this thesis.
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3. Methodology
3.1. Building familiarity with immersive documentaries
Despite the popularity that virtual reality has acquired in the past year, the access to the
cinematic content produced with the use of this technology is mostly limited to festivals,
what follows the cinematic tradition of keeping the content exclusive to these events
before the release for the big audience. Participation in these festivals, in the
experiences and discussions that they created, and observations of user practices were
crucial in order to build familiarity with the new practices related to film and virtual
reality. The investigation of the new cultural practice by means of participation in, and
observation of, the field characterized an ethnographic approach that was partially
conducted in this research in order to inform the phenomenological analysis proposed in
the next chapters. Mitchell (2007) explains
“the fieldwork concept, which involves social immersion in a particular
setting. It generates a totalizing and holistic description that accounts the
group being researched - and that can be called ‘the ethnography of’ a
particular practice. Participant-observation is the dominant method within
this fieldwork and consists of observations, collection of stories,
interviews, surveys, archival research and so on” (p. 56).
The selection of the festivals that could properly represent this field was made while
taking different aspects into account, such as their pivotal roles in the development of
virtual reality as a new tool for cinematic practices. The first contact with virtual reality,
both concerning the device and the immersive documentary narrative, was at the
Kaleidoscope VR in Amsterdam, a worldwide festival completely dedicated to immersive
content. Another meaningful participation was the one at the first edition of the World
Virtual Reality Forum, placed in Crans-Montana, Switzerland. Both events propose to
be platforms for the discussion and development of virtual reality, and both of them
provided not only screenings of different immersive documentaries, but also
presentations, talks and debates, creating a rich environment for the representatives
from the industry, for researchers, and for the general audience. In order to create
diversity and to understand the use of immersive narrative in other contexts, I also
selected two other festivals that had virtual reality only partially in their programs: the Go
Short Film Festival in Nijmegen, which has an old tradition in supporting innovative
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technologies and research, this year represented by a session dedicated to virtual

reality; and the WE Festival, a cultural festival placed in Maastricht that allowed me to
provide the experience of different immersive narratives to the participants, making it
possible to closely observe people’s first reactions to the experiences of immersive
documentaries. The festivals were taken as an empirical and analytical starting point to
look for people, technology and content as they filled the atmosphere with discoveries,
exchange of information and experiences, and excitement with the newness. The
festivals involved different contents and their creators, technology developers,
researchers and general enthusiasts of virtual reality. To assure the clarity and in order
to understand the practices properly, I took into account the most outstanding evidences
among the observations, which later also influenced in the selection of a few narratives
to guide the phenomenological analysis. The cases chosen were: Witness 360: 7/7, The
Displaced, and Reframe Iran. Witness 360: 7/7 was my first experience of an immersive
documentary, and the most impressive one. As the newness of a technology plays an
important role on how it is experienced, the choice of this case gave a lot of important
insights for the phenomenological analysis. The second case that was chosen, The
Displaced, was produced by Chris Milk, one of the exponents of the current virtual
reality industry, and responsible for the big claim that virtual reality is an “empathy
machine”. The third case, Reframe Iran, was chosen because it treats the use of virtual
reality technology in a different way when compared to the others, not trying to
completely hide the medium from the images that the viewers see (this is a key
characteristic from virtual reality, as we will see in the following chapters).
The initial state of a new technology is a crucial moment, one in which it can become
integrated into existing practices, it can be modified, adapted or gain entirely new
approaches. To investigate the audience reactions of virtual reality in such an initial
stage provides unique insights about its potential as a new type of content experience,
more specifically about its potential as a new way to experience non-fictional narratives.
While new technologies gives new forms to existing practices, they also bring to light
the skills that are required to deal with these technologies in a fluid way. When it comes
to immersive documentaries, these skills are related not only the audience, but also the
filmmakers and other people concerned in the production of a documentary. First, they
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involve new types of cameras that allow stereoscopic filming and sound recording;
secondly, they involve how the audience deals with a screen (by wearing it) and also
how they perceive the scenes, as they are presented in 360-degree. This new medium
shows up by the means of new equipment and also new forms of telling stories, that
combined create a new type of experience for the audience and a new approach to
documentary narratives. However, its initial stage also means that both technology and
the use of it can still be redefined and improved, so the skills necessary to deal with it
are applied in a reflexive way, in the sense that they can transform future experiences.
While the industry side is developing theories about how virtual reality creates an
empathy machine, I have focused especially on the viewer’s experiences with this new
medium and on how they perceive the documentary narratives that are displayed. The
impressions I had from the observations and participation in the festivals, allied to my
own experience of immersive documentaries, lead me to a more specific investigation of
the meanings of both the perceptions and reactions that one can have toward an
immersive documentary narrative.
While most of the participants of the festivals were surrounded by different types of
immersive content, from games to social environments, and were, most of the times,
exulted by the new technology, my position as a researcher of the specificities related to
documentary immersive narratives lead me to focus my own experiences on this type of
content. This allowed me to get acquainted with a wide range of content that I could
compare in order to investigate better the perceptions involved in them. This rich
background of experiences, allied to an already existing tradition in the
phenomenological addressing of emotions in subjective film experiences, lead me to
conduct the more specific investigation of this thesis with the use of phenomenology as
a method and to adopt the ethnographic findings only as a tool for enlightenment when
needed.
3.2. Phenomenology and the lived experience of immersive documentaries
Virtual reality experiences involve a new way for the viewer to interact with the medium
and to relate with the content that is presented, one in which the body actively defines
what is seen but is also affected by this unexpected influence and by how the content is
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displayed. The use of this technology to tell real stories have been guided by the
promise of an empathy effect in the viewers, but it is only through the experience of this
narratives (rather than the creation of them) that one can affectively respond to them,
and it is through the phenomenological investigation of the perceptions and bodily
activities in some of these experiences that this thesis proposes the reflection and
insights about the emergence of emotions toward the world that is represented. Don
Ihde (1990) characterizes existential phenomenology as a method that emphasizes
interpretations of perceptions and bodily activities in human experiences, more
specifically in those experiences of the world that are shaped by the mediation of new
technologies.
Although the focus of this thesis is on particular experiences, they are used in order
to stimulate the comprehension of more general structures and meanings that enlighten
the experience and give it a wider significance, making it easily inhabitable for others. In
establishing phenomenology as a method for the investigation of experiences, Clark
Moustakas, based on Husserl’s ideas, argued that individual perception is the beginning
point for establishing the truth. He says: “however much we may want to know things
with certainty and however much we may count on others’ experience to validate our
own, in the end only self-evident knowledge enables us to communicate knowingly with
each other (Moustakas, 1994, p. 58). For practical reasons, the experiences of three
immersive documentary narratives were selected as representative, taking into account
the different interactions with the technology that they provided, the specificities in the
perceptions involved in them and the diversity of feelings that resulted from them. The
different aspects present in the three selected experiences illustrate how diverse
documentary immersive narratives can be, while, at the same time, they are all inviting
the viewer to somehow get intimate with the stories and with the characters, not only by
showing them (like in traditional film experiences) but by also including viewer’s bodily
involvement and perceptions.
In order to analyze my own experiences of these narratives in a way that they can be
generalized, and following the rules of the use of phenomenology as a research
method, which investigates human experience in its pre-reflective state, I had to put to
the side all the pre-suppositions, theories and opinions about virtual reality and all the
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feelings it can create in the audience that I previous acquired through the readings and
through the observations of other experiences and focused on the experiences as they
appeared. In phenomenology, this is called epoché or state of wonder, and refers to a
state in which the researcher steps back from ordinary ways of looking at things and
keeps a constant renewal of perception (see Moustakas, 1994; Van Manen, 2014; Ihde,
2012). Phenomenology has a setting of rules called reductions that aim to guide the
researcher in the process of maintaining the focus on what appears, on the details of
each experience, not on interpretations of them. These rules are summarized by Don
Ihde (1990) in three steps: “(1) attend to phenomena as and how they show
themselves, (2) describe (don’t explain) phenomena, and (3) horizontalize all
phenomena initially” (p. 22). When faced to each one of the experiences, I put aside my
role as a researcher and assumed the role of a viewer, of someone that is about to get
in contact with an unknown story. As soon as the experiences were over, I wrote down
everything that I had just experienced in the most possible detailed way, without trying
to explain why I felt something for a character or perceived something in a specific way
and without interpreting what was being written. Some questions guided the writing of
these notes. They were: How did I perceive this experience? What did I feel toward
these stories? And what did I feel toward the characters? How did my body react during
the experience? Did I interact with the device? How did I perceive the environment
around me? The focus was always on what was felt, what was seen, and what was
done. These notes (not any other one that was made during the observations of others
nor any content from presentations or conversations with directors, for example) were
the foreground for the analysis of the experiences, thus for the investigation of the
affective investments that one can have toward an immersive documentary narrative.
These notes are used as the basis to every description of the experiences present in
the following chapters, which help with the thematization of immersive documentaries,
and with the analysis that will build the argument of this thesis.
Just as the reductions that help phenomenologists in their personal experiences,
there is also a setting of ‘themes’ that can help the researcher on the reflective inquiry
process, which Max van Manen (2014) calls “existentials”. The existentials explores
different aspects of how a phenomenon is lived. They are: (1) relationality, which
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explores the way in which the self and others are experienced; (2) corporeality, which is
the way the body is experienced in the phenomena; (3) spatiality, or how one
experiences the space with respect to the phenomena; (4) temporality, focused on how
time is experienced in the phenomena; and (5) materiality, which is how things are
experienced. These existentals worked as a guide to the analysis of how immersive
documentaries involve different types of relations between the viewers, the content and
the technology. The spatial relation to the places that are displayed in a 360-degree
video, for example, is the most evident novelty that this technology brings, but there are
also the relation between the viewer and the characters, which can give us important
insights about the feelings, emotions, sensibilities and responsibilities that can arise
from these experiences. Corporeality, materiality and temporality are also key in the
comprehension of the experiences as a phenomenon that affects the body.
Inspired by Vivian Sobchack (2004) and her use of phenomenology in film studies,
this thesis expects to arise not only questions concerning the lived experiences of
immersive documentaries, but also an appreciation of how they can concretely
contribute to our senses and feelings of the world and of others. The next three
chapters will provide a combination of theories and descriptions of the selected
experiences mentioned here that will help us to contextualize immersive documentaries
as a new cinematic practice that uses virtual reality technology. This new practice has
different ways of affecting the bodies from the viewers and of triggering emotions toward
the world, and this relation between the self, the medium, and the world will be further
analyzed from a phenomenological perspective.
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4. From cinema to virtual reality: the technological transition
4.1. Immersion and illusion in the cinematic experience
Film is a medium that affects the senses and emotional perception, and this
characteristic has given to directors a sort of power over the feelings of the audience
(Grau, 2003). Whenever a new cinematic technology arises, directors experiment with it
to test the different emotions it can induce in the audience. For Oliver Grau, the
emotional involvement increases as the audience gets more immersed in the
experience. Immersion, for him, is a process that absorbs the mind; it is a passage from
one mental state to another. In the development of cinema over the years, making the
audience feel more immersed in the images that are displayed has always been a major
goal. Technology has been used in different ways in order to make the images as
realistic as possible, and in order to enhance the immersion in the experiences of
movies. Siegfried Zielinksi describes the immersion experienced by the early audience
of cinema:
A darkened room, where the spectators, like Plato’s cavedwellers, are

virtually held captive between the screen and the projection room, chained
to their cinema seats positioned between the large-size rectangle on
which the fleeting illusions of motion appear and the devices that produce
the images of darkness and light. Cinema as an environment for the
enjoyment of art, for immersion in traumatic experiences, for hallucination,
for irritation of real experience. (quoted on Grau, 2003, p. 149)
Immersion, in this sense, refers to the way in which the audience of cinema felt
absorbed in the images, therefore in the stories that were presented; it refers to the way
in which the audiences are kept inside the cinema, only paying attention to the movie, to
its images and the stories that are presented in the screen.
Grau (2003) states that cinema used its potential to replicate real experiences in
order to establish itself as a potential medium. The first exhibitions of The arrival of a
train at La Ciotat in 1985 by the Lumiere Brothers are a famous example of how the
audience got immersed in the experience of cinema from its beginning. People felt so
immersed in this new type of experience that they got scared and ran when the screen
showed a train coming in their direction. This reaction was due to how the camera was
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positioned in an angle that corresponded to the observer’s point of view, which created
the illusion that the train would come out of the screen. For the first time the audience
was experiencing such a thing, their perception was not prepared or habituated to this
type of experience of the image. The similarity to the real world, or the momentary
illusion of reality, was so big that the audience “got lost” in the experience, they were
completely immersed in the virtual images – forgetting, for a brief moment, that what
they were seeing was just an image, not a real train coming closer. Marie-Laure Ryan
(2001) argues that the illusion of reality is a key factor in the process of getting
completely immersed in an image, what makes immersion and illusion intrinsically
related. Grau states that extreme reactions like the one from the first audiences of
cinema occurs whenever a new medium of illusion is introduced, but that soon the
audience gets habituated to it, the illusion vanishes and the reactions are not so
extreme anymore. If during the exhibition of The arrival of a train at La Ciotat the
audience believed the train would come out of the screen, soon they got used to images
that refer to the observer’s point of view and the illusion that the image of the train is
something real coming out of the screen was gone. The audience quickly got used to
the experience of cinema, and stooped to react in such an extreme way, that is, they
understood that the image was just an image and could not suddenly transform into
reality. Although the complete illusion of reality was gone, the audience kept going to
the cinema and they kept getting immersed in the stories presented in the screen, not in
the sense of getting deluded by the images, but in the sense of momentarily forgetting
the external world and paying attention only to what is being shown and being
emotionally involved with the stories. While Ryan claims for a complete immersion in an
image that is only possible if there is an illusion that the image is actually a reality, Grau
shows that a complete illusion of reality is only possible if the audience is not used to
the technology in question.
As the audience got used to the initial experience of cinema, the filmmaking industry
kept exploring new technologies in order to keep enhancing the immersion, and to keep
affecting the emotions of the spectators. Some common examples are the 3D glasses
that create spatial depth and gives to the audience the impression that the objects are
outside of the screen, and more recently the IMAX rooms in movie theaters, which
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consist in huge curved high quality screens and spatial sound, sometimes also
accompanied by 3D glasses. These technological innovations adopted by the cinema
impressed the audience in a first moment, like when people tried to reach for objects in
the air when using 3D glasses, but again the surprise effect and the illusion of reality
was gone as soon as they got used to the innovation. These innovations can be found
in the majority of movie theaters nowadays and are quite popular, but they do not bring
illusion of reality to the audience anymore. They also did not replace the traditional
experience of cinema, as the audience also watches movies without these technologies,
and they keep being captivated by the stories besides the technology involved in the
presentation of the content.
Sergei Eisenstein, in his essay “O Stereokino” (1947) stressed that the ultimate
synthesis of cinema would be a stereoscopic version of it. Although no details about the
technology were given, he argued that stereoscopic three-dimensional images
combined to stereo sound would be able to pour the image from the screen into the
auditorium, affecting the audience more than the traditional cinema does.
Complementing Eisenstein’s theory, Grau (2003) argues that an increased proximity
between the image and the audience can affect the viewers psychologically, which can
result in more control over the affective investment from the audience. For him, the
presentation of the content in 360-degree images creates an immersive image space
that makes the experience more similar to real life. It is exactly this type of experience
that the virtual reality devices we have nowadays propose: 360-degree images and
sounds that are exhibited as closer as it is possible to the spectators through the use of
head mounted displays that excludes the external world from the sight and from the
audition. This transition from flat to 360-degree images and sounds follows Martin Lister
(1995) and his statement that virtual reality “is frequently seen as part of a teleology of
the cinema – a progressive technological fulfillment of the cinema’s illusionistic power”
(p. 15). Although virtual reality technology has been developed for more than fifty years
now, it is only with the recent popularization of virtual reality devices like the Samsung
Gear VR or the Google Cardboard that the cinema industry started to invest in this new
way of telling stories. Among researchers and professionals from the film industry and
their debates in recent forums and events, the use of virtual reality technology in cinema
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gives birth to a new type of movie: the immersive one. Virtual reality, as we will see,
attempts to be a completely immersive and is considered to be an extreme variant of
immersive media (Grau, 2003). Once again, the industry experiments a new technology
in order to renew the illusionistic power of cinema, in order to enhance immersion in the
experience, and in order to affect the emotions from the spectators more intensely.
4.2. Virtual Reality: How is it used by the cinema industry?
Before presenting the ways in which virtual reality can enhance immersion and illusion
in cinema, first it is necessary to understand how virtual reality technology is being used
by the cinema industry, more specifically in the development of documentary narratives,
once they are the focus of this thesis. Virtual reality technology involves many features,
going from simple 360-degree head-mounted displays to complex experiences involving
other devices, connected to different parts of the body, and that are used to create
interaction with the virtual environments. Ryan (2001) explores textual narratives in
virtual reality environments, and she does so by analyzing the technology with all its
features, including possibilities for what would be the ultimate implementation of it: the
Holodeck from the movie Star Treck1. She breaks down the scenario of this ultimate use
of the technology in eight themes:
1. You enter (active embodiment) . . .

2. into a picture (spatiality of the display) . . .
3. that represents a complete environment (sensory diversity).
4. Though the world of the picture is the product of a digital code, you
cannot see the computer (transparency of the medium).
5. You can manipulate the objects of the virtual world and interact with its
inhabitants just as you would in the real world (dream of a natural
language).
6. You become a character in the virtual world (alternative embodiment
and role-playing).
7. Out of your interaction with the virtual world arises a story (simulation
as narrative).
1
Micahel Heim defines the Holodeck as “a virtual room that transforms spoken commands
into realistic landscapes populated with walking, talking humanoids and detailed artifacts
appearing so life-like that they are indistinguishable from reality. The Holodeck is used by
the crew of the starship Enterprise to visit faraway times and places such as medieval
England and 1920s America.” (quoted in Ryan, 2001, p. 51).
17
8. Enacting this plot is a relaxing and pleasurable activity (VR as a form

of art) (p. 51).
These themes refer to the ultimate possible use of virtual reality technologies, one that
is present only in the imaginary of people and on science fiction movies like Star Treck.
The use of virtual reality technology to create a new type of cinema experience is
reduced to only a few of these possibilities. Like Einsenstein (1947) and Grau (2003)
envisioned, cinema would become the experience of watching closely 360-degree
images and sounds, which can seem very simplistic when we consider all the
possibilities offered by virtual reality technology even though it is still not completely
developed. In Ryan’s definition of the themes she considers a virtual environment that
allows a high level of interaction, a virtual environment that can be inhabited and
modified by the users in order to create a narrative. In the experiences analyzed here,
the narrative is already presented by the images and sounds, and the only possible
manipulation refers to the choice of the angle through which the spectator can watch the
scenes. Virtual reality in its advanced use is an interactive simulated environment, that
is, it is constituted by computer-generated images that can be inhabited by, manipulated
and modified by the users. In its current cinematic use, virtual reality refers mostly to the
exploration of 360-degree images and sounds that cannot be modified. The
documentary character of the experiences that are the focus of this thesis narrows
down even more the use of virtual reality by cinema. In this case, the 360-degree
images and sounds have their reference in the real world, so there is no creation of
computer-generated environments that could be somehow manipulated2. Although it
seems very limited, it is exactly this close exploration of 360-degree images and sounds
that can influence a lot the emotional investment from the spectators in the stories that
are presented, as argued by Einsenstein (1947), Grau (2003), and the current directors
working with virtual reality in movies.
From the list of eight technological aspects proposed by Ryan in the ultimate use of
virtual reality, only four of them were observed in the experiences analyzed in this
thesis: active embodiment, spatiality of the display, transparency of the medium, and
2
The implications of this reference in the real world will be explored further in the next
chapters.
18
alternative embodiment. In order to understand how they influence the perceptions from
the spectators, these aspects will be individually explored below.
4.2.1. Active embodiment
“Embodiment” is a concept that can be used with different connotations. As a

technological aspect of virtual reality experiences, active embodiment refers only to the
physical body, and how its movements interact with the technology, affecting the
representation of the world that is displayed (Ryan, 2001). In this sense, active
embodiment is a result of the tracking capacity of the device, which processes physical
movements of the head and reflects them into the 360-degree images and sounds that
are displayed, allowing the viewer to explore the scene in different angles, giving the
impression that the viewer is entering into the image, not only watching them. In this use
of the concept of embodiment, the body is taken only as an empirical thing or analytical
theme, an object among other objects, a text, or a machine, without taking existential
aspects, like the intentionality and intersubjectivity of the body, into account (Csordas,
1994; Sobchack, 2004). The intentionality and intersubjectivity of the body are also
crucial for the phenomenological analysis present in this thesis. It is through these
aspects that we can understand the meanings behind the actions from the spectators.
They also help us to understand how the spectators relate to the content that is being
presented considering their historical background and relations to the world. The
intentionality and intersubjectivity of the body will be further explored in the session
dedicated to the sense of presence in the experiences of cinema and virtual reality.
For some authors, virtual reality is actually a disembodying technology because it
replaces the body with an image of it (Balsamo, 1996; Penny, 1994; Stone, 1991). In
the case of the documentaries explored here, there is no creation of a body image that
inhabits the virtual space. Instead, the images erase any reference to a body. In this
case, virtual reality can be a disembodying technology in the sense that it completely
excludes the image of the viewer’s body from the virtual world, but it is still through the
actions taken by the viewer that the scenes can be seen and the sounds can be heard
from different angles. It is only through this activation of the body that the viewer has the
impression of being inside of the image that is presented. Taking The Displaced as an
19
example: the movie initiates with the image of an 11 year-old boy, Oleg, writing on the
green board of a completely destroyed classroom. We watch this scene as if we were
positioned in the middle of this room. If we look ahead, we see the boy. If we look to the
sides or to the back, we see the empty spaces that constitute the room: windows,
stones and broken walls. But if we look down, in the direction of our feet, we do not see
a body, or anything that refers to a body. We only see the ground and the pieces of
stones and dust that constitute it. There is not even a sign from the tripod that holds the
camera that is shooting the scene. If we move our arms or our feet, nothing will change
in the image, we will keep seeing the destroyed place and the young boy. But every
movement from the head is tracked, so when we look around, our vision from the space
changes according to our movements and we can see the whole space: the ruins of
what was once a classroom and where the little boy we see used to study. It is the
physical action of looking around that allows us to look around inside of the virtual
world. The point of view taken is the point of view of the camera, and the movements
from the head are echoed in the images captured by the lenses. It is like the viewer is a
floating head in the middle of the scene, or an invisible body that sees everything, but
that cannot be seen; this erasure of the body might seem like disembodiment, but it is
only by activating the physical body that the film can be explored in its fullest capacity; it
is by moving our heads that we can see the virtual space surrounding us, and that our
body, although invisible, feels like it is present in the scene. The physical body is used
as if it was an extension of the camera, as an interface. Going against the arguments
toward the disembodiment created by virtual reality, Brenda Laurel (1993) argues that
VR offers a rare opportunity to take our bodies with us into imaginary worlds. In the
case of these documentaries we are only using our body to explore a real world that is
presented by images, we are not taking our body to an imaginary world, but still this
exploration is only possible if we move our physical body. For Ryan (2001), if we
compare the exploration of a virtual world with a headset to a walk around town, then it
may involve a significant loss of corporeal freedom, but still it allows more physical
action than just sitting in front of a screen, like in the traditional experience of cinema.
The body is activated in the experience when one uses the head-mounted device, and
this activation gives the impression that the space showed by the images can be
20
explored, which leads us to the second technological aspect stated by Ryan: the
spatiality of the display.
4.2.2. Spatiality of the display
In this second theme, Ryan argues, a body only enters a picture if it is fully spatial, and
there are three senses involved in the experience of this virtual space: the first is the
sense of being surrounded, which is the result of how virtual reality technology allows
the body to turn around and to inspect the image from different angles; the second
sense is depth, which is created by the virtual reality displays and how they work with
perspective; the third sense, the possession of a movable point of view, is necessary to
acquire a full sense of depth as it allows objects to get bigger or smaller according to
the distance from the eye of the viewer (effect known as motion parallax). The
possession of a movable point of view is only possible because, in this type of
experience, a computer tracks the movements of the viewer’s head and updates the
image according to them. Ryan argues that virtual reality is the only medium that can
combine the properties of 360-degree panoramic picture with a 3D display, and with a
point of view controlled by the user. A virtual reality experience, in the words of the
“father of VR”, Jaron Lanier, is described like this:
When you put [the glasses] on you suddenly see a world that surrounds
you – you see the virtual world. It’s fully three-dimensional and it
surrounds you, and as you move your head to look around, the images
that you see inside the eyeglasses are shifted in such a way that an
illusion is created that while you’re moving around the virtual world is
standing still (quoted in Zhai, 1999, p. 176)
If we take The Displaced as an example again, this moment of discovering a world that
surrounds us happens not only when we put on the glasses, but in every transition from
one scene to another. Every new scene represents a new space to be observed. The
transitions are done by the insertion of a fade to black that lasts for a few seconds
before it slowly reveals the new scene. The angle through which we look at the space
around us does not change as the scenes change, only as our head moves. If I am
looking at the ground of the classroom in the first scene and I keep my head in the
21
same position during the few seconds of black screen, the next scene will start with a
vision of the ground of a boat, and once again I will have to change the angle to explore
the space around me by moving my physical head. In this case, this movement will
reveal the rest of the boat, the river and Chuol, the African little boy who is conducting
the boat like he did when he escaped with his family. The device displays a 360-degree
image that I can explore through different angles and the proximity of the screen to our
eyes, combined with the 3D depth that the device creates, allows the scene to be seen
without any frame limiting it; the medium is visually absent in the experience. This is
radically different from a traditional experience of cinema, in which the frames are
delimited, making a clear division between the real world, which the spectator inhabits,
and the world presented by the screen – which can also refer to a reality, not an
imaginary world, in the case of documentaries. Besides the clear distinction between
the world from the movie and the world from the spectator, there is also the fact that,
although the images coming from the camera directly present the sight of the director,
erasing the camera itself, the scenes can only be seen from this established point of
view, no matter how the spectator moves in the real world. The spatiality from the
display exists due to the transparency of the medium, which is taken to another level in
virtual reality. Virtual reality aims to completely erase the medium from the perceptions
of the spectators.
4.2.3. Transparency of the Medium
For Ryan, the transparency of the medium is not just an end in itself; it is actually the
precondition for a total immersion in a virtual world created by a display. She says: “for
immersion to be complete, visual displays should occupy the entire field of the user’s
vision rather than forming a world-within-a-world, separated from reality by the frame of
the monitor” (p. 58). Ryan also explains that, in a final stage of the development of
virtual reality, the disappearance of the medium would be achieved on two levels, a
physical one and a metaphorical one. In the physical level, the computer would be
made invisible to the user as she wears it on the surface of the skin; in the metaphorical
level, the computer would turn into a space that encloses more than a desktop and a
chat room: this space would become a world that the user can inhabit. Immersive
22
documentaries are far from achieving the metaphorical level, but in the physical level,
the disappearance of the medium is already in an advanced stage.
Jay David Bolter and Richard Gruisin, in their book Remediation (1999), recognize in
our culture a desire for total immediacy, for total transparency in media experiences as
they are developed. They say that “our culture wants both to multiply its media and to
erase all traces of mediation: ideally, it wants to erase its media in the very act of
multiplying them” (p. 5). Some authors argue that virtual reality is the ultimate medium in
the history of media, as it is a medium that remediates all other media existent until
now, and it does while making itself transparent to the users (Zhai, 1999; Ryan, 2001).
Traditional cinema was already considered to achieve a high level of transparency of
the medium, as the images representing reality do not necessarily show the
technological equipment responsible for recording the images (although the medium is
not completely erased because there are still frames limiting the images and separating
the sight from the viewer from the director’s sight). Walter Benjamin observed this
disappearance of the equipment in his famous text “The Work of Art in the Age of
Reproducibility” (1936). He said:
The representation of reality in film is incomparably the more significant for
people of today, since it provides the equipment-free aspect of reality they
are entitled to demand from a work of art, and does so precisely on the
basis of the most intensive interpenetration of reality with equipment (p.
116)
Although this transparency of the medium is broadly adopted by documentary

filmmakers, there are some directors who choose to make the equipment as apparent
as possible, exactly to call the attention of the audience to the fact that the movie refers
to a representation of reality, not reality itself. This format is also being reproduced in
the creation of immersive documentaries. In Reframe Iran, for example, the medium is
transparent in our unframed access to the scenes, but in some of them all the other
equipment is revealed, like the microphones and other cameras, as well as the crew
involved in the production of the movie. In these specific scenes, when we look around
we not only see the studios where the artists presented by the movie work, or their daily
activities. We see the directors from the movie sitting in front of these artists, or the
cameraman shooting what will later be a traditional version of the documentary. The
23
transparent aspect of the medium still plays an important role in placing the viewer in
the middle of the scene, in creating spatiality and immersion in the virtual environment,
but in this case this transparency is questioned when the viewer sees the rest of the
technological apparatus that identifies the scenes as representing the process of
making a movie. The viewer has access both to the reality of the artists (when the
scenes show nothing but the studios, sometimes also showing artists working on them)
and to the reality of the filmmakers who are telling the stories of those artists. In both
cases, the viewer assumes the role of an observer of the scenes. These scenes reveal
places and characters from a reality distant from our own, a reality that cannot be
accessed by the physical body. The transparency of the medium places the spectator in
the middle of the scenes, and even though there is no reference of a body in the
images, the spectator assumes the role of an observer, one that is not seeing the real
world, but only the world from the images. This leads us to the final technological aspect
of an experience of an immersive documentary: the alternative embodiment.
4.2.4. Alternative embodiment
Alternative embodiment, in the ultimate use of virtual reality technology, refers to the
possibility for users to redesign their bodies and become something or somebody else
(by the assumption of an avatar) in virtual environments (Ryan, 2001). Ann Lasko-
Harvill, former collaborator with Jaron Lanier in the development of virtual reality
technology, said that in virtual reality “we can, with disconcerting ease, exchange eyes
with another person and see ourselves and the world from their vantage point” (1992, p.
227). Although there is no role-playing or assumption of an avatar as a body in the
experiences of immersive documentaries, the concept of alternative embodiment is
crucial for the discussion of emotions as something that can be enhanced by virtual
reality technologies. In Ryan’s analysis of the use of virtual reality in narratives,
alternative embodiment transforms the viewer into a character that can interact to the
virtual world. In immersive documentaries, this transformation is only partial since there
is no interaction with objects, characters or other users involved in the experience. The
alternative embodiment, in this case, is primarily a result of the cinematic use of the
technology to make the viewer look through the point of view of others. Bolter and
24
Gruisin (1999) argued that one way to understand virtual reality is as a remediation of
the subjective style of film, and Vivian Sobchack (2004) explains how this “visual
reflexivity in which we see ourselves seeing through other eyes” was, before cinema
existed, “accomplished only indirectly” (p. 149). In her words, prior to cinema,
We understood the vision of others as structured similarly to our own only

through looking at – not through – the intentional light in their eyes and the
investments of their objective behaviour. The cinema, however, uniquely
materialized this visual reflexivity . . . In sum, the cinema provided – quite
literally – objective insight into the subjective structure of vision and thus
into oneself and others (p. 149).
Cinema as a technology created the illusion of looking through other eyes. What virtual
reality technology adds to this cinematic experience is the possibility to fully explore
what these other eyes see, and the spatial illusion of being in the place where the other
was when capturing the images; it transforms the point of view into something mutable
that can be controlled by the movements of the viewer.
In Witness 360: 7/7, the moments that precede the explosion are reconstructed in
images that show the spaces visited and seen by the character (the witness who
survived the bomb attack). Just like she saw on that day, we also see the street in front
of King’s Cross station, the inside of the station with the trains passing by, the interior of
the train and the people who are present there. The images make the viewer witness a
reproduction of what the survivor witnessed on that day, this is how cinema makes us
look through other eyes. But this is an immersive documentary, which means that we
have the possibility to explore these images in 360 degrees and to hear the sounds
accordingly. We don’t have to look at the interior of the train from only one perspective;
we can explore this interior as if we were sitting on the bench with people surrounding
us. The gaze is not fixed anymore as we can move our heads and look around, which
gives the impression of being inside of the image, even though the camera is still in a
fixed position and we can only explore the images from where it is standing. Virtual
reality works here as an extension to the camera’s gaze, one that allows more than a
fixed way to look at a scene. In the experience of Witness 360: 7/7, the possibility of
looking around at a scene that represented what someone else was seeing during the
day of the attack made me feel like I was not only looking through other eyes, it felt like I
25
was transporting myself to that day, to those places. Even though there is no reference
to a body in the image, the process of looking around, combined to the aural real
testimony of the events by the woman who witnessed everything, made me forget that I
actually needed to see my body in order to feel present on the scene. For a few
seconds, I imagined that I was not only there: I was the witness, on that tragic day.
This example, like some older experiences made with virtual reality comparing the
emotions that a viewer can have in the real world and in the virtual world3, shows that
virtual reality can be a legitimate experience when it remediates other point-of-view
technologies, especially film (Bolter and Gruisin, 1999). The body disappears from my
sight, but I still use it to look around, I still feel the heartbeats getting faster as the
moment of the attack approaches. In Witness 360: 7/7, the camera is used to show the
point of view from the witness on that day, it is not used to show her figure and her
actions, strategy taken by the director to place us on the body of the other. With the
implementation of virtual reality and the possibility to explore these images without
actually seeing the medium, this can create the illusion that we are not only seeing what
other eyes saw, but that we are actually present on the places that we see. In the case
of Witness 360: 7/7, it worked also to make me feel like I was assuming the position of
the witness.
When we consider the three experiences analyzed in this thesis, Witness 360: 7/7
was the only one that created an alternative embodiment related to the character from
the movie. The sense of being part of the scene, of being with the characters, also
existed on the other experiences, but in every situation the feeling was of being a ghost
that can observe the reality that is presented, not of being one of the characters who is
actually living the situations. Both in The Displaced and Reframe Iran the camera
worked to show how other people were living their lives, or to show them telling us how
their lives are. There was no use of the camera in order to imitate the point of view of
the character on these other movies. But the different strategies taken by the directors
did not change the fact that I could still explore the places surrounding me and feel
present in the scene, even if it was like a ghost instead of like a character. The
3
Bolter and Gruisin (1999) mentions experiences made with clinical acrophobic patients in
which they are tested in virtual environments. The symptoms they exhibit are the same as
they do in real life, showing that virtual reality feels real enough to frighten them.
26
alternative embodiment was present in all of the experiences, with a differentiation on

what the other body would be. The change in the sense of presence is a key difference
between a traditional experience of cinema and an immersive one. The sense of
presence is also very important in the understanding of how we relate to what we see in
the images, of how our living body experiences the virtual world that is presented.
Because of the relevance and complexity of this theme, it will be further elaborated in
the next chapter. But before we move to this discussion it is necessary conclude this
chapter by defining the ways in which virtual reality technology works when combined to
cinema in the creation of the experiences of immersive movies.
4.3. Immersion, interactivity and illusion of reality in the experience of

immersive movies
For Ryan (2001), the technological aspects of virtual reality technology work in order to
create a completely immersive experience that is different from the experiences
provided by other media. From the eight initially proposed technological aspects
proposed by her, we can narrow down the experience of an immersive documentary to
four:
1. You enter (active embodiment) . . .

2. into a picture (spatiality of the display).
3. Though the world of the picture is the product of a digital code, you
cannot see the computer (transparency of the medium).
4. You can become a character in the virtual world (alternative
embodiment).
The combination of these aspects gives to the spectator another dimension to the
experience of being immersed in a movie. It transforms the experience of immersion,
which in virtual reality becomes an experience “of being ‘in’ rather then before an
image” (Lister, M., Dovey, J., Giddings, S., Grant, I., Kelly, K., 2009, p. 114). Lister et al.
foreground this character of immersion in virtual reality in Margaret Morse (1998) and
how she explains the difference from being immersed in a film experience and being
immersed in virtual reality. In her words:
VR is like passing through the movie screen to enter the fictional world of
the “film”, and entering a virtual environment is like ‘being able to walk
through one’s TV or computer, through the vanishing point or vortex and
27
into a three-dimensional field of symbols . . . The VR user is a spectator

whose ‘station point is inside the projection of an image, transformed from
a monocular and stationary point of view into mobile agency in three-
dimensional space (quoted in Lister et al, 2009, p. 114-115).
Being immersed in virtual reality means that the spectators feel like they are inside of
the scenes, not only watching them. This immersion is dependent on the illusion of
being somewhere else, on the illusion that what is seen and heard through the device
can be experienced like it was part of the real world. As explained before, this
immersion exists because the virtual reality devices exclude the external world from the
experience, and makes the spectators feel like they are somewhere else. This is the
illusion of reality that Ryan (2001) claimed to be a key component for a complete
immersive experience, and that Grau (2003) argued that only exists if the audience is
not used to the technology in question. Besides the illusion of reality, Ryan (2001)
stated that the immersion in virtual reality is also dependent on the interactivity present
in the experience.
Interactivity is a problematic term, as each author uses it according to a different
logic. Manovich (2001), for example, criticizes the very notion of interactivity. For him,
“once an object is represented in a computer, it automatically becomes interactive” (p.
71), which can mean that any interaction between a human and a computer is an
interactive process. In this sense, the experience of an immersive documentary can be
considered interactive for the simple reason that it involves a relationship between
humans, images, and a computer through which the content is presented. Different than
Manovich, McMillan and Hwang (2002) states that interactivity not necessarily involves
a computer. For him, interactivity is a concept that remains insufficiently defined, as it
can be approached in many ways, depending on how we see it. He stands for a broader
understanding of the concept that does not reduces it to something specific to new
media. McMillan and Hwang suggests three different types of interactivity: the first is the
one in which the user interacts with another user, the second one involves an
interaction with a document and only the third one refers to the interaction to a
computer. The first type of interaction (user-to-user) existed before the advent of media
and refers to communication between users in general – dialogues, feedbacks etc.
Media, in this case, give new possibilities to this type of interaction. The second type,
28
the user-to-document interactivity, started as a one-way communication process in

which the content is delivered to a more or less passive audience and, with the advent
of new media technologies, evolved into an interactivity that allows content exchange
and co-production, for example. Only the third type refers to user-to-system interactivity
and refers to the interaction between humans and computers. This type of interactivity
can be controlled by the computer, so the content is presented to a more or less
passive user, or it can be controlled by an active user. The last type of interactivity is the
one we can observe in the experience of immersive documentaries. The spectators, in
this case, are not just passively watching a content presented by a computer. They
become users, in the sense that they are also interacting with the content through the
head-mounted device. The interaction starts in the process of choosing the content that
will be presented, and it evolves into an interaction with the content as it changes
according to the movements from the head of the user. In this context, the definition
from Lister et al. (2009) of “being interactive” is the one that explains in the simplest way
what happens in the experience of an immersive documentary. In their words: “being
interactive signifies the users’ (the individual members of the new media audience)
ability to directly intervene in and change the images and texts that they access” (p. 22).
Jonathan Steuer (1992) argues that, in order to create complete immersion of the
viewer in the experience of virtual reality, there are some technological requirements
related to the interaction with the device:
Speed, which refers to the rate at which input can be assimilated into the
mediated environment; range, which refers to the number of possibilities
for action at any given time; and mapping, which refers to the ability of a
system to map its controls to changes in the mediated environment in a
natural and predictable manner (p. 86)
The first requirement, speed, is what guarantees the real time response of the system to
the user’s actions (the head movements in this case). When we move our heads in
order to explore the 360-degree spatiality of the image, the computer must respond
quickly to our movements in order to make the angles change according to our
movement. If the system is not fast enough, it will create a delay in the change of the
images and the illusion that we are looking at something real will be gone. The second
factor, range, arises as a consequence of the first, since faster feedback leads to more
29
actions, and more actions leads to more changes. The range, or the number of
possibilities for action, must be as close as possible from a real experience. When we
are exploring a space, we must be able to look in every possible direction, in the speed
that we think is more appropriate. When presenting the images, the computer must give
to us as many options as in a real experience of looking around, and it must be fast
enough to follow our actions as we change them. The third requirement, mapping, must
guarantee the match between the user’s action and how they change the images. If we
look to the left, the system must change the images and sounds accordingly. If the
computer does not have a good mapping and does not react according to our
movements, the immersion in the experience will be broken. Each one of these
requirements exists in order to guarantee that the users will have an experience as
similar to real life as possible.
In order to create a complete immersive experience, the interaction with the content
through the device must not only exist, it must also occur as if there was no computer
mediating the images, that is, the computer must work perfectly in order to give the
impression that it does not exist. The immersion in the experience is dependent on the
proper responses from the technology, and if everything works as it should, the users
will have the illusion that what is being seen and heard is part of the real world.
In the transition from traditional cinema to immersive cinema (here understood as the
one which adds virtual reality technology to the experience), the way in which the
images are presented to the viewers change dramatically. If once the images were seen
from a certain distance and framed, in virtual reality they are seen as if there was
nothing mediating them, and the technology creates the possibility of interacting to
these images by choosing the angles through which the scenes will be seen. Being
immersed in a virtual reality experience refers not only to the possibility of interacting
with the images by moving our heads. In this case, being immersed in the experience of
a movie means that the viewers will feel like they are part of the scenes that are
exhibited. Virtual reality technology works to enhance a sense of presence in the world
presented by the movie. Ryan (2001) explains the relation between immersion and the
sense of presence:
30
Immersion . . . describes the world as a living space and sustaining

environment for the embodied subject while presence confronts the
perceiving subject with individual objects. But we could not feel immersed
in a world without a sense of the presence of the objects that furnish it,
and objects could not be present to us if they weren’t part of the same
space as our bodies (p. 68).
Lister et al. (2009) complements this explanation. For them, the immersive interaction
provided by virtual reality includes “the potential to explore and navigate in visually
represented screen spaces . . . [and] the goals of the immersed user will include the
visual and sensory pleasures of spatial exploration” (p.22). When we go back to how
authors like Sergei Einsenstein and Oliver Grau envisioned the future of cinema, it is
this possibility of exploring the immersive space created by 360-degree images and
sounds would bring the audience closer to the content that is presented, affecting the
emotions in a more effective way. In this sense, the advanced technology would be the
only responsible for the changes on our experiences of cinema and on how they can
influence our relations to the world. But this is a determinist approach that is not
sufficient for the phenomenological inquiry of this thesis, which follows Don Ihde’s
(1990) ideas of how the technology shapes our experience as much as the perceiving
body does.
This chapter has shown the ways in which virtual reality technology has changed the
experience of cinema, and some of the ways that the audience is affected by this
change. In one side, cinema continues to play its role as a technology that presents
stories from the perspectives chosen by the filmmakers, which can, sometimes,
simulate the points of view of the character from the story. Meanwhile, virtual reality
technology excludes the external world from the senses of sight and audition, and it
transforms the flat space of the image into a space that can be explored by the viewers,
which creates a sense in the viewers of being present inside of the scenes that are
presented instead of looking at them from a distance. On the side of the viewer that
experiences the immersive movie, the body is activated when it enters into a scene
instead of watching it from a distance, and the body is lived as an alternative body
during the experience (sometimes an inexistent body, like a ghost that only observes,
and sometimes like one of the characters). Meanwhile, the consciousness is tricked by
the transparency of the medium, which can make people think that what they are seeing
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through the device is actually real and that they can even touch it. For Ryan (2001), one
way to understand the relationship between the self and the technology in a virtual
reality experience is to call for a phenomenological analysis of the sense of presence
through which the user feels corporeally and consciously connected to the virtual world.
This line of thought will be followed in the next chapter. Now that the role of the
technology in the experience of immersive movies is known, I will move to the theories
and experiences that help us to comprehend the ways in which the body perceives and
shapes the relationship between the self, the media, and the world. The next chapter
will show how the sense of presence is felt in the experiences of cinema and of virtual
reality, and how the combination of these two perspectives constitute the sense of
presence that is experienced by the body in immersive movies.
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5. The perceptional differences between the experiences of cinema and virtual

reality
5.1. The sense of presence in cinematic experiences
When someone is watching a movie, in its traditional form, there are two types of vision
involved in the experience: the vision of the subject who is looking at the screen and the
vision of the camera of a certain scene. Vivian Sobchack (2004) defines the cinematic
sense of presence as an existential presence that is always subjective. The subject is
always divided between the subjective vision and the vision of other (or the vision of the
observer/viewer and the vision of the camera). When we watch a documentary about
terrorist attacks, for example, we will watch it considering our previous knowledge about
the theme in general, about the movie itself, about the characters, the director etc., and
we will also look at the parts of the scene that interests us the most, like a character
talking about her experience, or sometimes paying attention to a detail on the corner of
the screen. Meanwhile, the scenes that we see are all the results of how the director
chose to tell the story about the attack, what scenes were chosen to be exhibited, how
they were framed etc. The first vision, the vision of the observer, is subjective because it
is influenced by everything that constitutes the observer’s self. Furthermore, the
subjective vision is also selective as it only appropriates part of the scene – and never
sees itself entirely. The second vision, the one from the camera, is subjective in the
sense that it is the result of the director’s choices of what to register and how to register
it.
Sobchack also says that, besides of being subjective, the cinematic sense of
presence is also influenced by the temporal perception that is multiply located in the
images and where the physical body is present. When we watch a movie, we perceive
time objectively as it passes where we are physically (like the two hours that a movie
can last), and we also perceive the time subjectively as we imagine, remember and
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project forward the events presented by the images. Part of the experience of watching
a movie is to imagine what is going to happen in the narrative, and we do so by
remembering the previous scenes and relating them to the events that we see in the
present scenes. The viewer needs to, simultaneously, orientate the subjective
perception of time from the objective perception that refers to the here where the body
is at present. Vivian Sobchack concludes that the lived body understands the
coexistence of these two structures in their discontinuous state, and takes them as
coherent in a specific cinematic experience. We perceive and relate to the stories
presented in the movies knowing that they are present in a different place and in a
different time than our own, and knowing that the images are the result of the subjective
view from a director about a certain event – which we will absorb according to our own
perspective about the theme of the movie. The significance of these characteristics of
time and space in cinema is that it is intimately bound to a structure of “accumulation,
ephemerality, presentness, and anticipation – to a presence in the present informed by
its connection to a collective past and an expansive future” (p. 151).
Sobchack argues that this sense of presence change with the advent of electronic
media, like TV and computers. In this case, the sense of presence becomes focused on
the present, on the instant stimulation and impatient desire, differently than the
cinematic anticipation of a future. When we are watching television, we can change the
channels whenever we want (if we do not feel satisfied by the content that is presented
or when it ends, for example). When using computers, we can not only change the
channels to watch something else, we can also change the type of activity, like going
from watching a movie to reading a text that will give us more information about the
theme of the movie, about the casting etc. We can also easily change to activities that
are not related to the movie at all, leaving the experience of the movie unfinished or
postponed. When experiencing these electronic media, our sense of presence is related
to different screens, or to different - and simultaneous – activities. This is different from
the traditional experience of cinema in which we are completely focused on the content:
we are immersed in one experience only. The traditional experience of cinema is to
actually go to the movie theater and to absorb the content that is presented on the
screen from the beginning until the end. Naturally, we are not obliged to stay in the
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room until the end of the movie if we don’t like the content and feel like leaving, but this
is a physical act of leaving a place, of leaving the experience, of deciding not to be
immersed in the story anymore. Sobchack explains that electronic media constitute an
alternative electronic world of immaterialized (although materially consequential)
experience, a world in which the spectator is incorporated in a “spatially decentered,
weakly temporalized and quasi-disembodied (or diffusely embodied) state” (p. 153). In
this sense, the viewers are not divided between the “here and now” and the “there and
then” that is characteristic from the cinematic experience. Instead, the “here and now” is
divided with other multiple “there and then”, the viewers perceive different times and
spaces simultaneously, and this homogeneous discontinuity constitutes an absolute
presence.
The change in the temporality transforms the qualities and the nature of the occupied
space, which becomes “correlatively experienced as abstract, ungrounded, and flat”, or
“a screen for play and display rather than an invested situation in which action counts
rather than computes” (p. 158). The occupied space turns into something flat that needs
to somehow gather the interest of the spectator, otherwise it will be easily exchanged by
another activity. The viewers, when faced with the possibility to explore different
screens (or different channels, in the case of TV), divide themselves in multiple
experiences – and the attention that was once completely focused on one content now
is diffused and superficial. In the combination of constant bodily action and multiple
screens, electronic media experiences become a purely spectacular sense of bodily
freedom (and freedom of the body), and our emotional and ethical investments become
diffused just like our attention. When watching a movie at the cinema, our emotions are
all directed toward the content that comes from the images, and so does the ethical
investments that come from these emotions. In the words of Sobchack:
Along with this transformation of aesthetic characteristics and sensibility
emerges a significant transformation of ethical investments. Whether
negative or positive in effect, the dominant cultural technologic of the
electronic and its attendant sense of electronic “freedom” have a tendency
to diffuse and/or disembody the lived body’s material and moral gravity (p.
158).
The author mentions some questionings about how virtual reality fits in this argument,
particularly as it tries to mobilize the human sensorium in electronic space, “re-
35
embodying” rather than “disembodying” the viewer (actively and alternatively embodying
instead of disembodying the viewer, as argued in the previous chapter). For this,
Sobchack answers that the general logic elides or devalues our bodies in the physical
space as they ground such fantasies of reembodiment. For her, electronic presence
does not have the point of view and the visual situation that is characterized by the
cinema, and no bodily dimension is inscribed since this is a characteristic only of
centered and intentional projection. Frederic Jameson explains the consequences of the
disembodied state of being mentioned by Sobchack:
The liberation . . . from the older anomie of the centered subject may also
mean, not merely a liberation from anxiety, but a liberation from every
other kind of feeling as well, since there is no longer a self present to do
the feeling. This is not to say that the cultural products of the postmodern
era are the utterly devoid of feeling, but rather that such feelings – which it
might be better and more accurate to call “intensities” – are now free-
floating and impersonal, and tend to be dominated by a peculiar kind of
euphoria (quoted on Sobchack, 2004, p. 159)
Sobchack suggests that this euphoric presence, lacking in interest and investment in
the human body and in “enworlded action”, can be dangerous. This crisis of the lived
body in electronic media is reflected by people who prefer to live in the virtual world with
a simulated body – with an insubstantial presence in which they can ignore the
problems from the real world. By ignoring the lived body, these people ignore their own
story. But immersive movies, although being one of the results of the evolution of
electronic media, are also an evolution of the cinematic experience.
As argued before, this new type of movie experience physically activate our bodies
and make them more active than in the traditional experience of cinema, once we must
move our heads in order to experience the movie with its full capacities. In this sense
the body is, at least physically, the center of the experience. But immersive
documentaries also disembody the self as they completely delete the real world from
the sight of the viewer. They erase any reference of a body from the images, making us
observe the events like floating heads placed in the middle of the scenes. We become
invisible observers that can see everything directly from the perspective of the
director/the camera (which sometimes simulates the perspective of the characters), but
we are observers that cannot be observed. In the experience of The Displaced, for
36
example, some characters sometimes seemed to be looking at “my” direction, but they
could not see me, as they did not know I was watching them. They were looking at a
camera in a tripod, and some of them would even show curiosity about this strange
apparatus in the middle of their environment, but they did not know that somewhere far
away, in another time, another person was looking right into their eyes and exploring
those environments as if she was there with them. Cinema already had the capacity to
show us other stories, other times and places, but we would watch and observe
everything clearly dividing our point of view from the point of view of the director, the
screen would separate our time and space from the one we were watching, separating
our sight from the sight of the camera. In this case, whenever we feel something while
watching a movie, we still have our own bodies as a reference of who we are in the
experience and where we are. By making the frame invisible and making the sight of the
lenses of the camera coincide with our own eyes, virtual reality technology brought the
sensation of being in the position of the director, of being part of other times and spaces
instead of our own, but not as living bodies: it transformed us into ghosts that can
observe everything closely, but that still cannot interact with the characters, neither
actively participate on another reality like the directors did when they were shooting. For
Sobchack, this disembodiment makes us ignore ourselves, our own story, and our own
responsibility toward what we see, it takes away our emotional investment in the
experience.
Differently than other experiences of electronic media, and going against Sobchack’s
argument, immersive movies work just like cinema when it comes to the existence of
the point of view and the visual situation. The difference is that, in this case, the point of
view and the vision from the viewer mixes with the point of view and the vision from the
camera. Just like traditional cinema, immersive movies are also centered and intentional
projections as the devices are directed to only one spectator at the time, in an
experience that goes further and isolates the external world and places the viewer in the
middle of the images. Instead of taking away the focus of the audience with multiple
options of activity, the use of virtual reality technology in movies aims to provide an
even more immersive experience of cinema, one in which the attention is completely
focused on the content that is presented, without any interference from the external
37
world; an experience in which the viewer is not looking at a scene from one fixed
perspective anymore, she can explore the scene spatially, with the impression that she
is placed in the middle of it. Specifically in the case of immersive documentaries, rather
than taking away the emotional investments toward the content by disembodying the
viewer, the use of virtual reality technology aims to provide the possibility of feeling
embodied in another space – a real one – in order to make the viewer feel more
intensely what it is like to be in the distant realities that are represented.
5.2. The sense of presence in virtual reality experiences
For Ryan (2001), in order to understand the phenomenological dimension of being

immersed in virtual reality experiences we must comprehend the experience of
“belonging to a world” in real environments. For that, she refers to Marleau-Ponty’s
work, The Phenomenology of Perception, in which he attempts to “capture the being of
things independently of the observer and a subjectivist stance by which my perception
creates objects and endows them with properties” (quoted in Ryan, p. 69). Marleau-
Ponty focuses on how the world and consciousness are put together and mutually
determined. Ryan explains:
For the perceiving subject, the world is phenomenal; consciousness

assumes its existence because it appears to the senses. Moreover, since
consciousness is intentional, it apprehends itself as directed toward the
world; self-consciousness is thus inseparable from consciousness of the
world. (p. 69)
Ryan argues that Marleau-Ponty’s work is particularly relevant to the experiences of

virtual reality because he emphasizes on the embodied nature of consciousness, going
against the doctrines that treat perception as a mere result of how things act on our
body, and also against theories of the autonomy of consciousness. For him, these
philosophies aim to a pure exteriority or a pure interiority, and they do not consider the
insertion of the mind in corporeality. In his theory, consciousness is both incarnate and
directly related to the world, what gives to the body the function of a point-of-view of the
world, and makes of the body our medium to have a world. A parallel can be traced to
Don Ihde (1990) and his phenomenology, which also does not believe in perception as
the mere result of how things (technology, in his case) act on our body, neither believe
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in perception as something that is not affected by things at all. The main difference, in
this case, is that Ihde developed a phenomenology that takes new media and
technology as something that mediates our experience of the world. The relationships
involving the self, the media, and the world, are dynamic and each one of the elements
shape and are shaped by the experience.
In order to understand how people relate to the world during the experience of
immersive documentaries, and the feelings that appear from this relation, both
phenomenological approaches can be used. To support this idea, I will take the
experience of Witness 360: 7/7 as an example: this documentary was created in order
to show to the audience what it is like to survive a terrorist attack. In this sense,
technological devices like cameras, microphones, and computers work together to
mediate a relation between people and an event that occurred in the real world, an
event that had serious and physical consequences that affected different parts of the
world. Besides the people who were physically present in the event, no one else would
know what it was like if it was not through some kind of mediation. In this case, the
mediation was done through the cinematic technology (with the adoption of virtual
reality elements), but it could also be done through the simple act of telling a story to a
friend, or through writing a text, or even through the images of a camera, which could be
shooting the place on that specific time. In this technological mediation of an event that
occurred in the real world to a broader audience that can be anywhere, not necessarily
close to the place where the event occurred, each one of the elements influence are
influenced by the mediated experience. The self (the individuals from the audience)
acquires knowledge about the world and about an experience that was not lived by it. At
the same time, the individual informs the reception of this knowledge with a personal
background about terrorist attacks, about the city of London, or about anything that can
be related to the content, making this individual experience an unique one. The media
shapes the experience when it presents the content in a specific way, in this case by
showing 360-degree images and sounds that reconstruct the experience of one of the
survivors from the attack. Simultaneously, media is also shaped by the different ways
through which the directors decide to use it in order to tell a story, or by how the
audience can use the device during the experience. The world shapes the experience
39
as the content comes from a real event, but it is also shaped when technology creates
representations of the event that can give new perspectives to the events, or when
people who are influenced by the content presented decide to transform part of their
realities.
These are only some ways through which the elements from the I-media-world
relationships can shape and be shaped by mediated experiences, used here to
exemplify how Don Ihde’s ideas apply to the experience of an immersive documentary.
But there is one specific characteristic from virtual reality technology that makes us also
relate the experience of it to Marleau-Ponty’s ideas: virtual reality aims to be a
transparent media, it tries to make people relate directly to the world without noticing the
mediation. This world could be a completely simulated one or it could have its reference
in the real world, like in the case of the immersive documentaries explored here (the
implications of this reference in the real world will be further explored in the next
chapter). In this sense, and taking again the example of Witness 360: 7/7, when people
experience the day of the attack through this immersive documentary, they will naturally
use technology in order to have access to the content, but once the device is
functioning, it will work in order to make the viewer forget that there is anything between
the eyes and the images that are seen. In the first minutes of the experience of Witness
360: 7/7, my attention was divided between the exploration of the images in every
possible angle and the search for signs of the tripod and the camera, so my relation to
what was being presented was very much influenced by the technology. I wanted to
understand exactly what was going on around me, how it was possible to see and to
hear everything in 360-degree. Slowly the images and sounds felt more natural, and the
feeling of being placed in the middle of the scenes grew. My physical presence was
momentarily forgotten and the feeling was that I was experiencing the day of the
survivor just like she did on that day. My consciousness knew that those images were
not the same that she saw (once this was a reconstruction of the day), but the feeling
was that everything that she described in my ears were actually in front of me, and I
was about to see exactly what she saw. Even though momentarily, the media was
forgotten, and I was somehow connected to those people and spaces that were
appearing in front of me. Obviously the media was not completely excluded and the
40
relationship was still an I-media-world one, but for a few seconds my presence was not
being felt according to where my body was physically, it was felt as if those people were
actually close to me, sitting inside of a train that only I knew that would soon be reached
by a bomb.
The sense of presence of things, if considered by Marleau-Ponty’s theory, is
acquired when we imagine ourselves physically reaching out to them. He says that “our
body is not in space like things; it inhabits or haunts space” (quoted on Ryan, 2001, p.
70) and Ryan explains that this difference between ‘being in space’, and ‘inhabiting’ or
‘haunting space’ is a matter of both mobility and virtuality. She says: “Whereas inert
objects, entirely contained in their material bodies, are bound to a fixed location,
consciousness can occupy multiple points and points of view, either through the actual
movements of its corporeal support or by projecting itself into virtual bodies” (p. 71). If
an actual body cannot touch an object, the knowledge that the virtual body could do that
already gives a sense of the shape, volume and materiality of the object, making it
present because it seems that there is a possibility of interaction. On an image, it is the
effect of texture and shading that makes the viewer feel like the three-dimensional
object is part of her world, and it is the interaction with the image that gives to the viewer
the impression that she is present in another space that is not the one inhabited by the
physical body. About this aspect, Marleau-Ponty says: “Successfully supported action in
the environment is a necessary and sufficient condition for presence” (quoted on Ryan,
2001, p.71).
During the experience of Witness 360: 7/7, the sense of presence was not always
felt directly related to the virtual world that was represented, this was only a momentary
feeling. The presence was divided again as soon as I imagined the attack that was
about to happen, feeling the anticipation that is characteristic from the cinematic
experience and that Sobchack said that was not present in the experience of electronic
media, including virtual reality. The same process occurs during the experience of the
other immersive documentaries such as The Displaced and Reframe Iran. The sense of
presence is also divided when we touch something unexpected with the feet while
turning on the chair (this movements is necessary in the physical world in order to see
in 360-degrees in the virtual world), and the images does not correspond to what we
41
physically feel. In these moments, the mediated character of the experience is very
clear and the consciousness is not being triggered by the invisibility of the medium from
our sight. But there are other moments in which the division between the real and the
virtual world gets blurred, moments like when my heartbeats considerably increased
while the images showed the seconds after the bombing attack in Witness 360: 7/7, and
I felt like I was momentarily experiencing someone else’s life; or when I felt physically
sick because I felt that I was inside of a boat with Chuol, the little boy who escaped his
home sailing and that is showed in The Displaced; or even when I felt like I had to move
from where I was standing because I was in front of the character that was giving an
interview in Reframe Iran, and standing where I was would make it impossible for the
camera to directly capture him, interrupting the flow of the movie.
This chapter has shown that, differently than what was argued by Sobchack (2004),
the sense of presence in the experiences of immersive documentaries explored here is
not the same as in the experiences of other electronic media such as television. In this
case, the sense of presence is not multiply divided among different activities and
screens, and there is not a complete disembodiment or a devalue of the body, once the
physical body acts and reacts significantly during the experiences, influencing (and
being influenced by) our consciousness of the world. The sense of presence that is
characteristic from cinema can be momentarily transformed by the possibility of not only
having one’s point of view of an experience, but actually being able to explore this point
of view as part of a spatial illusion, as part of an experience of being inside of the image.
For Sobchack, another issue of electronic media is that it focuses on presenting
representations, so the aesthetic value and ethical investment are located in the
representation-in-itself, in the simulation. What is not considered is that immersive
documentaries, although examples of experiences of electronic media, are mostly an
evolution of the cinematic form, and they represent the world according to this logic.
This representation can be fictional or it can be documental, and they can even be a
representation of another representation. In the specific case of immersive
documentaries, the representation is documental, that is, it is referenced in the real
world, with its real places, characters and consequences. When the sense of presence
becomes momentarily focused only in the virtual world during the experience of
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immersive documentaries, it is felt in relation to a virtual image that represents real

people, real places and real events. Whatever the feelings that grow from such an
experience, they are felt toward a reality that is being represented, not toward a
complete simulated world. In this point, Sobchack’s use of phenomenology in order to
analyze film experiences become crucial, mostly her thoughts about the role of the
perceiving and affected body in the experience of documental narratives. The next
chapter will approach the complex and broadly discussed relations between the real,
the virtual, and how we perceive them. The understanding of these relations is the last
necessary piece that will help us to build the conclusions about how emotions result
from this dynamic relationship between the self, the media and the world, not from an
exclusive influence from the technology in our experiences.
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6. The real and the virtual in the transition from cinema to virtual reality
Since Internet was created, the term “virtual” is almost naturally related to the realm of
digital technology, and it is usually taken as a synonymous of “simulation”. For Lister et
al. (2009), authors of new media studies have not agreed with a proper definition of the
term “simulation”, although the understanding of it is crucial for us to comprehension
and study of virtual reality. In their words:
Looser current uses of the term are immediately evident, even in new
media studies, where it tends to carry more general connotations of the
illusory, the false, the artificial, so that a simulation is cast as an
insubstantial or hollow copy of something original or authentic. It is
important to invert these assumptions. A simulation is certainly artificial,
synthetic and fabricated, but it is not ‘false’ or ‘illusory’. Processes of
fabrication, synthesis and artifice are real and all produce new real
objects. A videogame world does not necessarily imitate an original space
or existing creatures, but it exists. Since not all simulations are imitations,
it becomes much easier to see simulations as things, rather than as
representations of things (p.38).
In this sense, simulations are always real things created by real processes, and their
content can derive from representations, but not necessarily do so. The use of the term
“virtual” as a reference to simulation has led to different philosophical accounts of the
term. Lister et al. mention Gilles Deleuze, whose thoughts lead the authors to see that
“the virtual is not the opposite of the real but is itself a kind of reality and is properly
opposed to what is ‘actually’ real” (p. 37). Another philosopher that is broadly mentioned
in discussions about simulations is Jean Baudrillard, who criticizes our society for living
in a hyperreality. For Baudrillard (1994), the essence of simulation is the deception of
reality: “To simulate is to feign to have what one doesn’t have” (p.3).
Baudrillard (1994) defines hyperreality as a state in which the society can no longer
tell the difference between the real and the virtual (or the simulations of the real) as it
becomes technologically mediated. In Baudrillard’s theory, these simulations of the real
become a simulacrum, which means that the image goes through four different
44
evolutional stages: in the first one, “it is the reflection of a profound reality”, then “it
masks and denatures a profound reality”; in the third stage, “it masks the absence of a
profound reality” until it reaches the final stage, when “it has no relation to any reality
whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum” (p.6). In other words, as our society becomes
saturated by spectacular mediated images (through television and publicity, for
example), the connection to the real world is lost and we start to live in a completely
simulated world: the hyperreality in which we experience the artificial as real. Lister et
al. (2009) also explains this transformation in our society:
Representation, the relationship (however mediated) between the real

world and its referents in the images and narratives of popular media and
art, withers away. The simulations that take its place also replace reality
with spectacular fictions whose lures we must resist (p. 40).
Many authors criticize Baudrillard and his ideas about how the real is completely
covered by simulations, resulting in an absolute disappearance of the real. Marie-Laure
Ryan is one of the authors who criticize Baudrillard’s ideas, and so is Bill Nichols in his
studies about the documentary tradition of cinema.
6.1. Cinema and the documentary representation of reality
Bill Nichols (1991), known for pioneering the contemporary study of documentary film,
states that Baudrillard carries things to an extreme and does not consider in his criticism
how media, more specifically the documentaries, can sometimes be our only meaning
to access realities beyond our own. The simulation, in this case, exists as something
that represents reality, and for Nichols the existence of this simulation does not mean
the deception of reality. For Nichols, the difference between the image and what it refers
to is of extreme importance. He exemplifies:
Lives continue to be lost in events such as the invasion of Grenada even if

such a ‘war’ is reported and perceived far more as a simulation of war
than war itself. The reality of pain and loss that is not part of any
simulation, in fact, is what makes the difference between representation
and historical reality of crucial importance. It is not beyond the power of
documentary to make this difference available for consideration. (p. 7)
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While Baudrillard (1987) argues that simulations and simulacrum became intrinsic in our
lives, Nichols (1991) states that there is still the reality beyond them, the reality that
exists aside from any representation. What Nichols’s argument implies is that if this
reality needs to be considered or questioned, documentaries can be the tool to do that.
They can bring the attention of the viewers to issues that would not be accessible by
other means, creating the possibility for critical debate, encouraging response, shaping
attitudes and assumptions (p. x).
Naturally, there are different ways of representing reality (and there are even ways of
simulating reality without representing it). Bill Nichols categorized five different modes of
representation of reality that are present in the documentary tradition: the expository,
the observational, the interactive, the reflexive and the performative. The expository
mode refers to documentaries that “unfold the world in terms of the establishment of a
logical, causal/effect linkage between sequences and events”, and that usually present
an argument to be followed by the viewers (pp. 37-38). The second mode, the
observational one, stresses the least intervention of the filmmaker as possible, the
disappearance of the camera, and it provides to the viewer the possibility to look and to
overhear the lived experience of others, “to gain some sense of the distinct rhythms of
everyday life” (p. 42). The third mode is called interactive4 because it presents the text
as conversations with the filmmakers, interviewers, and sometimes the stories are told
directly to the camera. In this mode, the historical world is presented to the viewers by
the people who inhabit it. The fourth mode, which Nichols describes as reflexive, makes
the representation of reality the topic of cinematic meditation, not the reality itself. The
performative mode does not create an argument about the historical world, it “makes
the viewer rather than the historical world a primary referent” (p. 94). These modes may
coexist within one documentary, according to the interests of the filmmakers and how
they want the audience to perceive the reality that is represented.
In the case of reflexive documentaries, for example, which aim to create reflection
upon the style or language used to represent reality, Baudrillard’s argument can be
applied perfectly, and the representation of reality (simulation) becomes a reality of its
4 The term “interactive”, in this context, refers to the human interaction between two people (filmmaker
and character, for example). As discussed in the first chapter, the term has other meanings in the context
of digital media.
46
own, with no reference to what was represented in the first instance (simulacrum). But
in the case of documentaries which the main goal is to make an issue from the real
world available for consideration and change (and this issue would not be accessible
otherwise), it is important to consider that they might be representations that are taken
as if they were real, and that can affect reality as people start discussions about their
issues or as they decide to act upon them (which characterizes a hyperreality), but it is
only because of these representations that some situations that need intervention can
be changed.
This logic echoes in the making of immersive documentaries, as there are different
types of productions and different ways of representing reality by using this type of
technology. Some of them aim to create reflection upon the use of the new technology
in order to tell a story, like Reframe Iran, in which the camera is positioned between
interviewers and interviewees, allowing the viewers to observe both sides as they
interact to each other. There are also examples of documentaries which aim is to
interfere in reality by representing it with the help of virtual reality technology. The
Displaced is one of them. This immersive documentary was produced by Chris Milk in
partnership with The New York Times and Google Cardboard, and sent to millions of
subscribers of the newspaper in the United States. Chris Milk (2016) explained during a
presentation that his intention was to show the American population the effects of the
refugee crisis in the lives of children who have to leave their homes in war situations.
More than showing the reality of these children, Milk aimed to make the audience feel
like this is a local problem, not an external one. His aim was to increase the feeling of
empathy in the audience toward the refugees.
Documentaries allow people to have access to different views of the world, to its
social issues, cultural values, problems, solutions and diverse situations (Nichols,
1991). As Nichols explains, “the linkage between documentary and the historical world
is the most distinctive feature of this tradition . . . It proposes perspectives and
interpretations of historic issues, processes and events” (p. ix). There is a sort of
agreement between the audience and the documentary filmmakers, a bond of trust that
these representations are based on the actual socio-historical world, not on a fictional
world imaginatively conceived (Beattie, 2004; Nichols, 1991; Warren 1996). Nichols
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(1991) explains how viewers comprehend and interpret documentaries in order to make
sense of it:
Cues within the text and assumptions based on past experience prompt
us to infer that the images we see (and many of the sounds we hear) had
their origin in the historical world . . . In documentary we often begin by
assuming that the intermediary stage – that which occurred in front of the
camera – remains identical to the actual event that we could have
ourselves witnessed in the historical world (p. 25).
Nichols argues that it is possible, then, to accept Baudrillard’s theory about the influence
of images in our lives without assuming his nihilistic position. Different from watching a
fictional representation of reality that has no reference in the historical world and is pure
simulacrum, in documentaries the viewers prepare themselves to grasp an argument
about a certain issue, not to just comprehend a story, and they do so because the
sounds and images that are shown bond to the world they all share, they refer to a
reality that needs to be considered. For Nichols, viewers are less engaged by fictional
characters and their destiny than by social actors and destiny itself.
In a phenomenological approach of the viewer’s experience of cinema, Vivian
Sobchack (2004) argues that what is experienced in fiction is taken as abstract, while in
documentary it is experienced as real. In her argument, the differentiation between
fictional and nonfictional representations is not solely dependent on cinematic cues: it is
mostly dependent on the subjective relations between the viewers, with their
extratextual and cultural knowledge, and the images on the screen, which are the result
of the filmmaker’s choices.
When it comes to documentaries, the filmmaker’s gaze at a certain event or character,
although inscribed as objective, is also subjectively and ethically influenced, and so is
the viewer’s gaze at the images that result from the filmmaker’s choices. This
conjunction of the viewer’s lifeworld and the image that is the result of the filmmaker’s
gaze of a certain reality is what Sobchack calls the “documentary space”.
In The Displaced, for example, the director decided to portray parts of the children’s
daily lives after they escaped the war. The movie aims to show their new lives in a
transparent way, as if there was no interference in the events, but behind this objective
gaze is the subjective choice of presenting reality in this way – another option would be
to show children in the process of moving out of their homes, for example. The way in
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which the viewers process these images depend on their background knowledge about
the refugee crisis, on the way they relate to issues involving children, or even their
acknowledgement of the documentary character of this movie – in this case, the titles in
the beginning make clear that the images refer to reality. By knowingly watching a
documentary, the viewers automatically inform the images with their previous
experiences and ethical concerns, and they take these images from the realm of the
virtual – the simulation that is also a representation of reality - to the realm of the real,
that is, their reactions and feelings will arise related to the real characters and stories,
not to the representation itself. For Sobchack, documentaries work to present a reality
to the viewers, not only to represent it. She uses the term “documentary consciousness”
to refer to this “embodied and ethical spectatorship that informs and transforms the
space of the irreal into the space of the real” (p. 261). The documentary consciousness
refers not only to the experience of traditional cinema, it can also be applied in the
experience of immersive documentaries, since the essence of their images is also the
reference in real events, characters and places. In the experience of The Displaced, the
presentation of the reality of refugee children to the audience is not taken only in itself,
the viewers inform their experience with their own background about the refugee crisis.
When Chris Milk produced this movie, the aim was to evoke emotions toward the
children and their real stories, not to the film or to the experience itself.
Milk (2015) argues that virtual reality technology is an “empathy machine” that is
capable of creating empathy in the audience toward real people from the real life. In his
speech, the main factor that would contribute to this type of reaction is how virtual reality
technology creates the illusion of being part of the spaces inhabited by the characters,
so the audience would feel like what they are seeing in the virtual environment is part of
their real world. But this is a determinist point of view, as it believes that only the
technology is responsible for influencing the experience of the movie.
If we consider the phenomenological perspective in which the technology of
mediation informs the experience as much as the body and the world does, the
experiences of immersive documentaries, in this sense, are informed by the
combination of: (1) technology/media: the virtual reality capacity of creating the illusion
of a real experience and the documentary ability to connect the audience’s lifeworld and
49
emotions to what is being represented in the images; (2) body: the ways in which the
body relate and react to this technology and to the world it represents; (3) world: how
the reality presents itself in the experience and how it is affected by it. From this
perspective, the emotional bonding between the viewers and the real characters
presented in the documentary results from dynamic relation between the self, the media
and the world, not only from the use of virtual reality technology and the illusion of
reality it offers. For being the experience of a documentary, the reference of the images
in the real world are very significant for the experience as a whole, once they trigger a
documentary consciousness that connects the audience to the real world, not to a mere
simulation. What virtual reality technology adds to the experience, and that is also very
significant, is the exclusion of the physical space between the eyes and the screen,
creating an illusion in the viewers that they are present in the real places that are
presented by the virtual images.
6.2. Virtual reality and the illusion of reality
Marie-Laure Ryan (2001) suggests three distinct “senses of the virtual” that are involved
in virtual reality experiences. One of these senses, which she calls “the optical one”5,
implies the significance of the virtual as illusion, and is a premise for the immersive
dimension of the virtual reality experience. Immersion, for her, depends on the “reading
of the virtual world as autonomous reality, a reading facilitated by the illusionist quality
of the display” (p. 13). For Ryan, the duplicity is what characterizes a virtual image, like
a reflection in a mirror; the virtual image is not legitimate but is identical, and it can be
so close to the real that it creates an illusion of reality. This illusion of reality, as argued
in the last chapter, is the one responsible for making the viewers feel completely
immersed in the experience of immersive documentaries in a way that the medium
becomes really transparent, even if momentarily.
5Marie-Laure Ryan defines the other two senses as the “scholastic”, which uses the virtual as
potentiality, and the “informal technological”, which takes the virtual as the computer-mediated. These two
senses are related to the VR experience in a computational and an interactive addressing that will not be
explored in this thesis. See more on Narrative as Virtual Reality, 2001, p. 13.
50
Like Bill Nichols in his theories about documentaries, Ryan also builds her argument
of the sense of the virtual as illusion opposing it to the ideas of the philosopher Jean
Baudrillard. For Baudrillard (1994), the transparency of the medium increases the
existence of simulacrum and excludes the real from people’s lives. He considers virtual
reality as the concretization of the hyperreality and argues that it leads us to the end of
the illusion (his use of the term “illusion” has a different connotation than Ryan’s):
Artificial intelligence, tele-sensoriality, virtual reality and so on – all this is
the end of illusion. The illusion of the world – not its analytical countdown
– the wild illusion of passion, of thinking, the aesthetic illusion of the
scene, the psychic and moral illusion of the other, of good and evil (of evil
especially, perhaps), of true and false, the wild illusion of death, or of living
at any price – all this is volatilized in psychosensorial telereality, in all
these sophisticated technologies which transfer us to the virtual, to the
contrary of illusion: to radical disillusion (p. 27).
Ryan (2001) puts under questioning this black-or-white vision as she argues that it
creates an impression that there is no way back to the real once people get immersed in
virtual worlds (p. 32). It is as if there was no choice: people either live in the real or in
the hyperreal, and the simulacrum is so fascinatingly real that seduces people to make
the “wrong” choice.
The transparency of the medium present in virtual reality experiences can create
such an illusion of reality that the viewers feel like they can even reach out the
imaginary objects, but they are brought back to reality as soon as they realize that it is
not possible. This is the moment in which the sense of presence is not completely felt
toward the virtual world anymore and becomes divided between the physical space and
the virtual space. In different occasions, while observing people experiencing immersive
documentaries, it was possible to notice the moments in which they believed that what
they were seeing was part of a tangible reality. In one side are the children, who tried to
reach the virtual objects or to walk through the virtual environment. Once they realized
that they were not able to feel the touch of the virtual objects, they immediately took off
the glasses, looked around for their parents and then put the glasses again to go back
to the experience. Adults would try to reach an imaginary object or an imaginary person,
but they would laugh at themselves seconds later for trying to do such a thing,
sometimes making comments about how they were feeling foolish for believing in the
51
illusion created by the image. Ryan argues that the sense of touch is a fundamental
condition of a complete sense of the real, and the absence of it is what keeps the viewer
still connected to the real world, away from getting lost in the virtual image. Besides the
sense of touch, the consciousness of the viewers also do not get completely fooled by
the virtual reality experience even when the sense of presence is toward the virtual
world instead of the physical world. The viewers know that this is a mediated experience
of the world even when the medium achieves its maximum transparency.
Ryan states that the illusion created by virtual reality technology is something
momentary, and does not have permanent effects on society like in Baudrillard’s
predicament. In the experience of immersive documentaries, this momentary illusion is
always referenced in the real world as the viewers feel like they are present in other real
spaces and relating to characters from the real world. For Baudrillard (1994),
simulations lose their reference in the real world and become pure simulacrum, what
makes of our world a completely simulated one as people start to live the artificial as the
real, as the illusion become a permanent state. But as argued in the previous session,
the documentary consciousness triggered by the reference of the documentaries in the
real world makes the viewers immediately relate their experience to reality, to other real
people, and to real events. This chapter has shown that simulations, when referenced in
the real world, bring the viewers back to reality. The consciousness does not let the
viewers be completely fooled by the medium. The artificial, in this case, is not lived as
real: it is consciously lived as a representation of the real world. But even when the
viewer is conscious about the representational character of the experience, the
documentary consciousness also directs the reactions triggered by the experience to a
reality that, although represented, actually exists. As stated by Sobchack (2004), the
documentary consciousness also brings an embodied and ethical spectatorship that
transforms the space of the irreal into the space of the real, which results in an
increased emotional bonding between the viewer and the content that is presented.
In the last three chapters I have described and contextualized the experiences of
immersive documentaries as dynamic experiences that involve subjective and objective
relations between the viewers (the self), the technology (the media), and the world.
Each element from this relation equally affects and is affected by the experience.
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Technology evolved and the use of it created a new level of immersion in the
experience of cinema, the body and the consciousness were affected by the difference
in the sense of presence, while also becoming more active in the process of making
sense of this more immersive experience, and the world gained a new form of
representation of it, one that also creates new relations between the viewers and the
realities that are far from them. Now the analysis is taken one step further in order to
enlighten the comprehension about the significance of the experiences of immersive
documentaries for the viewers. As Vivian Sobchack (2004) puts, the phenomenological
analysis “aims also for an interpretation of the phenomenon that discloses, however
partially, the lived meaning, significance, and nonneutral value it has for those who
engage it” (p. 160). In the next chapter I will argue that the existential meanings that
result from the experience of immersive documentaries are influenced by all the
elements present in this mediated relation between the self and the real world, not
exclusively by the technological element.
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7. The subjective meanings of the experiences of immersive documentaries
Experiences of immersive documentaries are one way through which individuals can
relate to distant realities that would not be accessible if it was not through mediation. As
argued through the last chapters, and following the phenomenological tradition from
Don Ihde, this is a dynamic I-media-world relationship, which means that each one of
the elements involved shape the experience as it is lived and are also shaped by it. The
subjective meanings and emotions triggered by these experiences are influenced by
this dynamic relation, in which the roles of the body and consciousness are as
significant as the technological aspects that define the experiences, and as the world
that is represented.
Don Ihde developed an existential phenomenology that deals exactly with our
experiences of the world and of each other when they are mediated by technology. In
the analysis of the experience of immersive documentaries present in the last chapters,
descriptions of parts of some experiences helped us to understand the dynamic
relationship between the body, the technology and the world. In Don Ihde’s
phenomenology, the description and interpretation of the individual experiences in order
to find subjective meanings does not reduce the investigation and the reflective process
to something personal or individual. Instead, “it provides the very intersubjective basis
for further investigation of more general forms and structural variants of lived
experience” (Sobchack, 2012, p. 14). Before we move to the interpretation of the
existential meanings of how our body and conscious behave in the experience of
immersive documentaries, a more detailed description of the three selected experiences
will provide insights about what exactly were the feelings triggered.
The experiences will be described following a chronological order, so it will provide
insights also about how the familiarity with a new technology influenced the way in
which I experienced the stories that were presented. In the last part of this chapter I will
relate these experiences to the theories approached in the previous chapters, and finish
54
the argument of how the emotions triggered by the experiences are resulted from the
complex relations between the body, the technology and the world.
7.1. Case Study 1 – Witness 360:7/7
My first experience of an immersive documentary took place at the Kaleidoscope

festival, in Amsterdam. When I sat on one of the chairs (which turned 360-degrees) and
put the glasses and the headphones on, the huge open room was gone from my sight
and I could barely hear the external sounds. All of my attention was suddenly toward
what I was seeing in front of me, and my only reference to the real world was the voice
of the instructor explaining to me what I should do to start the movie and how I could
adjust the focus if I felt it was necessary. Once the documentary started, all I could see
and hear came from the device I was using.
I had a brief idea, given by the booklet, of what Witness 360: 7/7 was about: it was
the story of a woman who survived a bomb attack in the subway of London in 2005, and
the proposal of the documentary was to combine her personal testimony to the 360-
degrees reconstructed and abstract imagery in order to take the viewers to the heart of
her experience on that day. The images started to appear and I was suddenly seeing
the King’s Cross station in front me, and a lot of people were passing by, some of them
looking at my direction with curiosity in their eyes. I could hear their voices getting
louder as they got closer to me, and fading away as they continued walking in another
direction. I could listen to the sounds of the city, of the cars, everything just as if I was
actually standing there, in front of that station. I explored the whole environment around
me, looking for some recognizable signs from London, remembering that I was there
only a few months before this experience, but not on that specific place. I was amused
by the sensation of being there, of being able to look at the sky. I looked down, in the
direction of my feet, searching for signs of the tripod holding the camera, but there was
nothing there, just the sidewalk. A tiny distortion in the image showed me that there was
an image of the tripod there, but it was erased in the post-production process. In the first
minutes of the film I divided my attention between the exploration of the images in every
possible angle and the search for signs of the tripod and the camera. I wanted to
55
understand exactly what was going on around me, how it was possible to see
everything like that. I wanted to understand who were the people I was seeing and who
I was in this experience. These people could not see me, the only thing they could see
were a tripod and a camera. All I could see was them, and everything that was
surrounding us. I felt like being a ghost that can observe everything, but that cannot be
observed, a ghost that does not even see its own body, a ghost that is an invisible
floating head watching everything. In these first scenes, little attention was paid to the
sounds or to the voice that was narrating the story. I knew that the woman was telling
me the events of that day, but the images were so impressive that I had to explore them
and enjoy the feeling of being somewhere I have never been before first.
Slowly I started to connect what she was saying to the scenes, and what she was
describing matched the images what I was seeing. When she mentioned a man that
was standing close to her on the train, I immediately looked for him, but did not see
anyone who would match her description. This experience was, after all, a
reconstruction of her day, the images presented were not from the exact day of the
attack, and what I was seeing was not exactly what she saw. But even being conscious
about this aspect of the movie, I was also conscious that those were the real places in
which she went, and that the story she was narrating to me was also a real one. Without
noticing, I caught myself feeling as if I was seeing through this woman’s eyes, as if I
was exactly in her body during the day of the attack.
When the moment of the explosion finally came, the only thing I could see was the
dark, with some momentary lightening, and my audition was muffled. This moment of
the experience felt so real that, for a while, I completely forgot that I could not see any
reference of a body, or that the voice of the woman in my ear was the narration of the
story, not my own thoughts. All I could focus on was the images in front of me, so I
would not move my head to look around me. My heart was beating faster, and my
hands getting sweaty. I had to catch up the breath slowly, while the voice in my ear
talked about how she would not be able to say goodbye to her daughter, and my
thoughts were only about how it would be like to not be able to say goodbye to your
beloved ones when you are about to die. She described the other people who were
around her, some of them dead, some of them alive and saying that everything would
56
be fine, that she was alive, and that she would see her daughter soon. My breath
gradually went back to normal, as I started to remember my own reality again, realizing
that what I saw was just an illusionary explosion and that I was only watching a
reproduction of it. This complete illusion of reality lasted for just a few seconds, maybe a
minute, but it was enough to make my whole body react as if I was actually living it.
Post-attack images of the places started to appear in front of me, and I was no
longer feeling like the woman who survived the bombing. Once again, I was only a
bodiless observer and my attention was only toward the places and how they looked
like. The image of the outside of King’s Cross station appeared again, but this time
there was a woman walking in my direction, the woman who survived the attack. She
walked with no hurry, looking at me. It was like she knew that I was there, and that I had
just experienced her life for a brief moment. We were accomplices in this experience,
witnesses of what just happened before our eyes.
I took off the glasses and saw the real world again, but it took me a few seconds to
understand the place in which I was again. Like when we wake up from a vivid dream,
my vision was blurred for a few seconds, and I could still feel my body readjusting itself
to the real world, my heart getting calmer again. I was at the Kaleidoscope festival
again, but the feeling was that I had just arrived from a very impressive trip to London in
which I saw something that I never thought I would see in my life.
7.2. Case Study 2 – The Displaced
When I got in contact with The Displaced, I had already a few experiences of immersive
documentaries and was no longer unused to it. The documentary is about the stories of
three refugee children, about the process they went through of being displaced from
their home countries, and about how they feel in their current situation. Oleg, 11 years
old, is a Ukrainian boy who left Ukraine when the bombings there started and that went
back home after the situation was stable again. Chuol, 9 years old, is a boy from South
Sudan who escaped with his mother – who got lost during the escape – and his
grandmother into a swamp when fighters swept into his village. Hana, a 12-years-old
Syrian girl, now lives in Lebanon with her family but dreams of going back home one
day. These children narrate their stories in their mother languages in this short
57
documentary of eight minutes, while we see images of their current living places and
daily situations in a narrative that guides us through the three stories with no specified
order or linearity.
The film starts with titles in a black screen, which serves to contextualize the stories
that are about to be presented: from around 60 million of people displaced from their
home countries, half of them are children. As the image of a young boy writing on a
blackboard faded in, I listened to the sound of the chalk in friction with the blackboard,
and, as I moved my head, I noticed that I was seeing the ruins of what used to be a
school. Although I was already used to watch documentaries in an immersive setting, I
could not help the feeling of suddenly being in the middle of the destroyed classroom,
and as if the boy was right in front of me. I looked around, driven by the curiosity about
that place that was completely destroyed by a bomb, wondering how it was before. After
a few seconds of amusement with the environment around me, I looked down, in the
direction of my feet, but there was nothing there besides the ground and the stones.
Just like in other experiences, although I had the impression that I was in the middle of
the place because I could look at any direction without any frame restriction, I could not
see any reference to a body, not even the tripod of the camera, which made me feel like
floating head that could see everything but not it’s own body. This feeling grew as other
scenes came in, some of them with people looking at “my” direction, but they could not
see me, as they did not know I was watching them.
During the eight minutes spent immersed in the lives of Oleg, Chuol and Hana, in
different moments I wanted to be physically present in their realities because then I
would be able to help them somehow. In a scene when I was seeing Chuol enjoying his
time with his family, and listening to his voice saying that he wish he was a lion so he
could fight all his enemies and protect his family, my own wish was that I was there to
help this 9-years-old boy to protect his family and make sure that they would never have
to face an attack again. The same happened when I saw Hana and other children
working in the plantation of cucumbers, and heard her saying that she has to wake up at
five in the morning to work all day and help her family. Her dream was that she would
leave Lebanon and go back home, where she could be just a kid again. The need to
help these children came back when Oleg said that he would never choose to leave his
58
country again, no matter if it is under attack or not. In these moments, being an invisible
observer that can explore everything around became something secondary. My head
was fixed, and I was looking at only one thing: these real children standing in front of
me. My focus was on the fact that I was seeing real people and listening to their own
voices telling me their stories, but there was nothing I could do to help them. There was
no curiosity about the places in which I felt I was anymore, only a disappointment for
being able to see, but not to act upon that reality.
7.3. Case Study 3 – Reframe Iran
The experience of Reframe Iran was one of my last experiences of an immersive

documentary, and it took place during the World Virtual Reality Forum. The film was
directed by João Inada and Matteo Lonardi. Before experiencing it I already knew some
important information about the choices from the directors that might have influenced
the experience as a whole. The directors proposed a different perspective about Iran, so
the movie was about Iranian artists (not about the political situation that is always on the
western newspapers). I also knew that João Inada wanted to clearly show the process
of making the documentary, so the images would show all the equipment and the staff
involved in the production.
The experience started before I put the Samsung Gear VR, as I entered a room that
was completely dedicated to this particular experience, with posters on the walls
showing pictures of the characters and technical information. When I finally put the
device and pressed play, I saw the image of a man sitting in front of me, reading a book.
The image was the same that I saw outside, in one of the posters. As I look around, I
notice that we are inside of a studio, probably his studio. A voice starts to speak and I
recognize it as the voice of one of the directors, João. He talks about the revolution in
Iran, about how the country is closed and about how the western world has a limited
vision of it. As the images pass by, I see different studios, different artists working, and
sometimes the crew from the movie interviewing one of these artists. In one particular
moment, I see one of the artists painting a huge frame in front of me. I look around for
the crew, but there is no one else but the artist with me in the room. For the few
seconds that this scene lasts, I feel like I can smell the ink that the artist is using. I
59
immediately wonder if I am mistaking the smell of the room in which I am physically in

by the imaginary smell of ink, or if this the smell of some actual ink put inside of the
room to enhance the experience (as the room was completely dedicated to it). During
those seconds, I think about all the possibilities, and even though I know that I am not
really placed on that studio, I can’t fight the smell I am sensing.
During one of the interviews, the artist looked at my direction, but as I looked to the
back, I realized that he was looking at João and Matteo while talking to them, and I was
in the middle of this conversation, interrupting it. I was not only seeing these artists
working in their studios, I was also witnessing the interviews that were being conducted
for the documentary. When the experience was over, I looked for any hint of the
existence of ink inside of the room, but there was nothing. The overall feeling, in the
end, was that I was tricked again by the technology even though I was supposed to be
used to it after so many experiences.
7.4. The feelings triggered in the experience of immersive documentaries
In the descriptions presented above, it is possible to see that some feelings are
common for all the experiences. The sense of being present in the virtual images, for
example, is significant even after a few experiences, when we are already used to the
technology. The virtual reality proposal to completely immerse the viewers in the
experience, by creating a spatial illusion, keeps working, even when we are conscious
about the effects of the technology in our sight. In a first moment, this sense of being
somewhere else makes us feel amused by the possibility to explore the spaces around
us, and it even makes us feel surprised when we see someone looking at our direction,
for example. As we get used to the 360-degree images and sounds, this amusement
and surprise disappears, but we are still captivated by the possibility to explore the
different realities from a perspective that puts us in the middle of the scene. The
immersive character of virtual reality technology keeps working. When a new element is
added to the experience (like the room completely dedicated to Reframe Iran), again we
can feel surprised by the experience. The exclusive room created the possibility of
someone (the instructor of the experience or the designer of the room) adding a
different smell to the experience without the viewer noticing it (as the device completely
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excludes the sight from the external world). The mere existence of this possibility was
enough to make me wonder if the smell I was feeling was something real or just
something created in my mind. The amusement with the sense of the smell was only
gone once the experience ended and I realized that there was in the room that could
possibly smell like ink: my mind was fooled by the immersion in the experience.
Different than the sense of being present in the images that is always characteristic
from the experiences of virtual reality, one aspect that changes from one experience to
another even as we get used to the technology is how we perceive our bodies. In a first
moment, we search for signs of a body, but soon we realize that they do not exist and
we accept our condition of merely ghosts in the middle of the scenes. But even as
invisible bodies, each experience positions the viewer in a different perspective,
according to the intentions from the directors and how they want the scenes to be seen.
In Witness 360: 7/7, the images reproduced the point of view of the main character. In
The Displaced, the viewer is positioned in order to see the characters and how they live.
In Reframe Iran, the viewer sometimes is positioned in the middle of a conversation.
These different points of view that can be assumed by the viewer influence the role that
the viewer plays during the experience. Even though the body is invisible in the images,
the physical body still reacts according to what the eyes see and how they see it. When
placed in the perspective of the main character, for example, my body reacted
accordingly – it even increased the heartbeats during the simulation of the explosion.
Differently, when placed in the position of a mere observer, the role that was assumed
was of someone who is watching the other tell a story, there was no assumption of the
other’s place. The alternative embodiment works according to how the camera is used
to frame the scene. The immersive aspect of the technology is not sufficient for placing
ourselves in someone else’s body. It is the intentional use of the camera by the
directors that affect the role that the viewers will assume during the experiences. Still,
the mere positioning of the camera is not completely responsible for how our bodies
react to the experience. The content that is presented by the images and how we relate
to it is as relevant as any other aspect that constitutes the experience of an immersive
documentary as a whole.
61
The reference in the real world that is characteristic from the documentary
representations is a key aspect in the constitution of the immersive documentaries.
Particularly in the experiences of Witness 360: 7/7 and of The Displaced, the realities
presented are cruel. These experiences refer to difficult situations lived by the
characters, different than the reality presented by Reframe Iran. In this case, the reality
presented is focused more on the artistic work that comes from Iranian people, not so
much on how they survive the political situation from their country. In the experience of
Reframe Iran, there was no significant emotion felt toward the characters or their
stories, different than what occurred during the other two experiences. In Witness 360:
7/7, the consciousness about the reality of the testimony that was given by the witness
was more significant than the simulated aspect of the images. Her voice guided the
experience and the perceptions of the images, and as the moment of the attack
approached, the body started to react as if it was actually about to suffer. I was
consciously aware of the representational character of the experience, but my body
reacted as if it was living something real. The illusionistic aspect of the technology was
empowered by the embodied and ethical spectatorship brought by the documentary
consciousness. In the case of The Displaced, there was no feeling of being one of the
characters, as the point of view given by the camera put me in the position of an
observer. But, in this case, the documentary consciousness made me feel sad when
confronted with the situations from those children, and it made me feel disappointed for
not being actually there to help them. The documentary consciousness in this case,
instead of enhancing the illusion of reality, did the opposite: it made me even more
aware of the virtuality of the experience. In these two experiences, death was not shown
in the images, but it was mentioned by the characters as part of their lived experience,
the lived experience that I was sharing with them through the immersive representation.
My vision of their realities was inscribed by the moral insight that is characteristic from
the cinematic visible representation of vision (Sobchack, 2004).
Summarizing, the experience of immersive documentaries triggers different types of
feelings in the audience, some of them related to the experience itself, some of them
related to their bodies, and some of them related to the world that is represented. In this
process, virtual reality technology is responsible for creating a spatial and immersive
62
dimension in the experience of film that involves the body in different manners. One of
them is the sense of being present inside of the image instead of in front of it. The body
is also experienced differently when the images (which are experienced as the viewer’s
own vision) delete any reference of a body, creating the possibility for alternative
embodiments during the experience. This virtual alternative embodiment has effects on
how the physical body relates to the experience, and so does the content that is
represented. When the viewers are conscious about the reference of the images in the
real world, the reactions and emotions triggered become not only related to the
experience itself, but also to the real world. The documentary consciousness can
enhance the illusion of reality created by virtual reality, but it can also make the viewers
even more aware of the virtual aspect of the experience. From this summary, it is
possible to argue that, in the dynamic I-media-world relationship that characterizes the
experiences of immersive documentaries, all the elements involved have important
roles in the subjective meanings and emotions triggered by these experiences.
When it comes specifically to the emotions felt toward the real world that is
represented, the documentary consciousness involved in the experience plays a
decisive role, as it is the responsible for connecting the viewers to the real world. The
way in which the body relates to the technology is deeply influenced by this
documentary consciousness, which means that the relationships between the viewers
and the world will inform (and be informed by) the experience significantly. The virtual
reality technology, in this sense, is far from being the machine capable of triggering
emotions in the audience, as some expected it would be. In this process, technology is
only one of the factors that influence the triggering of emotions, and it is deeply
dependent on the other elements from the I-media-world relationship.
63
8. Conclusion
Immersive documentaries are a new approach to the traditional cinematic experience of

documentaries, one that uses virtual reality technology in order to enhance the
immersion of the viewers in the experience. As this new experience of cinema tries to
establish itself among the viewers as a unique experience of another reality, some
researchers and filmmakers draw conclusions about the possible effects of the use of
virtual reality technology in the feelings triggered in the audience. But these conclusions
evidence a technological determinism that does not consider the important role of the
body in the experiences, a role that is as crucial as the role played by the technology
and by the world in the I-media-world relation that characterizes the experiences of
immersive documentaries. Taking into account a phenomenological tradition that puts
under questioning determinist points of view, this research has aimed to answer the
following questions: What are the experiences of immersive documentaries like? And
how does virtual reality technology influences the emotions in the audience in the
experience of immersive documentaries?
The last chapters have described and contextualized the different aspects that
constitute the experiences of immersive documentaries, showing that they are an
immersive alternative to the documentary tradition. In these immersive experiences, the
medium is deleted from the sight of the viewers, transforming their vision into the vision
of the filmmakers. The viewers can explore the angles of this vision in 360-degrees
spatial images that create a sense in the viewers of being present in the scenes, instead
of watching them from a distance. The role of the body changes with this new sense of
presence that is enhanced in the experience of immersive documentaries: besides
being an active body that interacts with the images, there is also an alternative
embodiment that can be experienced depending on how the viewer is positioned in the
experience by the sight of the camera. As representations of the real world, the
64
experiences are deeply affected by how the viewers perceive the reality that is
presented, process that takes into account the viewer’s previous knowledge about the
world and how they relate to it. Put shortly, these aspects answer the first research
question presented by this thesis.
To answer the second question, phenomenology worked as a research method that
helped the comprehension of the meanings of the experience as we live it. Through this
approach it was possible to conclude that the experience of immersive documentaries
triggers different types of feelings in the audience, some of them related to the
experience itself, some of them related to their bodies, and some of them related to the
world that is represented. These emotions are the result from a complex and dynamic
relation between the body, the technology and the world, in which technology can even
play a secondary role as it is deeply influenced by the documentary consciousness
involving the body and the reference in the real world that is characteristic from these
experiences. The virtual reality technology, in this sense, is far from being the machine
capable of triggering by itself emotions in the audience, as stated in some initial
predicaments.
Whenever a new medium appears, it does so with claims and hopes attached to it
(Lister et al. 2009). Researchers of new media practices must be careful not to
completely ignore the existential grounds that are essential for the experiences and for
the way in which the individuals make sense of it. This research aimed to contribute to
the discussion about the effects of virtual reality technology in the audience by taking a
phenomenological approach that strongly considered the role of the body and how it
affected (and was affected by) the experience. The selection of significant, but
completely different, experiences helped in the definition of the common aspects that
can be related to the experiences of immersive documentaries in general.
Phenomenological approaches do not give solutions to problems or general theories,
but they work in order to make us more thoughtful about the meaning and significance
of a phenomenon in our lives (van Manen, 1990). Although based in a few personal
experiences, the subjective meanings explored by this research provided the grounds
for a more general perspective to the lived experience of the immersive documentaries
that can enlighten further studies about this phenomenon.
65
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From cinema to virtual reality

A phenomenological approach to the experience of immersive

Name Sarah Tavares Barbosa

E-mail address s.tavaresbarbosa@student.maastrichtuniversity.nl

Course code MCU4800

Supervisor/tutor Jack Post

Assignment name Final Thesis

Academic year 20152016

Immersion can offer a counterweight to indifference. It can lure us into

3.1. Building familiarity with immersive documentaries

technologies and research, this year represented by a session dedicated to virtual

3.2. Phenomenology and the lived experience of immersive documentaries

4. From cinema to virtual reality: the technological transition

4.1. Immersion and illusion in the cinematic experience

A darkened room, where the spectators, like Plato’s cavedwellers, are

4.2. Virtual Reality: How is it used by the cinema industry?

1. You enter (active embodiment) . . .

8. Enacting this plot is a relaxing and pleasurable activity (VR as a form

4.2.1. Active embodiment

“Embodiment” is a concept that can be used with different connotations. As a

4.2.2. Spatiality of the display

4.2.3. Transparency of the Medium

Although this transparency of the medium is broadly adopted by documentary

4.2.4. Alternative embodiment

We understood the vision of others as structured similarly to our own only

alternative embodiment was present in all of the experiences, with a differentiation on

4.3. Immersion, interactivity and illusion of reality in the experience of

1. You enter (active embodiment) . . .

into a three-dimensional field of symbols . . . The VR user is a spectator

the user-to-document interactivity, started as a one-way communication process in

Immersion . . . describes the world as a living space and sustaining

5. The perceptional differences between the experiences of cinema and virtual

5.1. The sense of presence in cinematic experiences

5.2. The sense of presence in virtual reality experiences

For Ryan (2001), in order to understand the phenomenological dimension of being

For the perceiving subject, the world is phenomenal; consciousness

Ryan argues that Marleau-Ponty’s work is particularly relevant to the experiences of

immersive documentaries, it is felt in relation to a virtual image that represents real

Representation, the relationship (however mediated) between the real

6.1. Cinema and the documentary representation of reality

Lives continue to be lost in events such as the invasion of Grenada even if

6.2. Virtual reality and the illusion of reality

7. The subjective meanings of the experiences of immersive documentaries

7.1. Case Study 1 – Witness 360:7/7

My first experience of an immersive documentary took place at the Kaleidoscope

7.2. Case Study 2 – The Displaced

7.3. Case Study 3 – Reframe Iran

The experience of Reframe Iran was one of my last experiences of an immersive

immediately wonder if I am mistaking the smell of the room in which I am physically in

7.4. The feelings triggered in the experience of immersive documentaries

Immersive documentaries are a new approach to the traditional cinematic experience of

Manovich, L. (2001). The language of new media. MIT press.

McMillan, S. J., & Hwang, J. S. (2002). Measures of perceived interactivity: An

Nichols, B. (1991). Representing reality: Issues and concepts in documentary(Vol. 681).

Sobchack, V. (2006). Simple grounds: At home with experience. 2006),

Steuer, J. (1992). Defining virtual reality: Dimensions determining telepresence. Journal

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