Immersive Stories for Health Information: Design Considerations from Binge Drinking in VR

TL;DR

This study explores how immersive VR stories about binge drinking influence viewer attitudes and offers design recommendations to improve health communication effectiveness.

Contribution

It provides empirical insights into immersive story design elements that impact health perception and introduces best practices for creating effective health-related VR narratives.

Findings

Providing character reasoning enhances engagement.

Clear depiction of main character's behavior is crucial.

Experiencing escalating symptoms influences viewer perception.

Abstract

Immersive stories for health are 360-degree videos that intend to alter viewer perceptions about behaviors detrimental to health. They have potential to inform public health at scale, however, immersive story design is still in early stages and largely devoid of best practices. This paper presents a focus group study with 147 viewers of an immersive story about binge drinking experienced through VR headsets and mobile phones. The objective of the study is to identify aspects of immersive story design that influence attitudes towards the health issue exhibited, and to understand how health information is consumed in immersive stories. Findings emphasize the need for an immersive story to provide reasoning behind character engagement in the focal health behavior, to show the main character clearly engaging in the behavior, and to enable viewers to experience escalating symptoms of the behavior before the penultimate health consequence. Findings also show how the design of supporting characters can inadvertently distract viewers and lead them to justify the detrimental behavior being exhibited. The paper concludes with design considerations for enabling immersive stories to better inform public perception of health issues.