Immersive virtual reality (VR) for digital media making: transmediation is key
Kathy A. Mills, Alinta Brown
Abstract
The rapid evolution of virtual reality (VR) technologies and their adoption for learning opens up new possibilities for shifting semiotic content across modes, with underexplored scope for transmediating content in visual, haptic, and auditory ways in immersive media literacy practices. This research investigated users’ creative digital designing involving a popular, three-dimensional virtual painting program with upper elementary students who used a VR head mounted display and sensors. The analysis attended to how students transmediated the same story across written, verbal, and virtual painting modes, tracing key themes of the students’ virtual experience: (i) immersion and three-dimensionality, (ii) subjective presence, (iii) sensory illusion, and (iv) interactivity with motion tracking. Students reassembled and shifted narrative content, sometimes seamlessly, while experiencing ambiguity and complexity about three-dimensional representation in an immersive world. Producing stories across modes invited adaptation and generative thinking to overcome the lack of equivalence between writing, drawing, and virtual painting modes.