Creation of Audience Experience of Liveness Through Cinematic Virtual Reality Movies with Haptic Feedback

Movies have always had a certain level of immersion and ability to emotionally engage and connect their audience. This thesis aimed to go a few steps further and understand the level of immersion, interactivity, connection and presence Cinematic Virtual Reality (CVR) movies with haptic feedback create for their audience. CVR movies enhance the user experience through the immersive 360-degree view they create for their audience. Haptic technology on the other hand is capable of enhancing the feeling of immersion, presence and interactivity for its user. This thesis wanted to understand these concepts and the experience they create for the audience in a deeper level and thrived to find out how Haptic feedback support CVR movies in creating an audience experience of liveness. Liveness is a wholistic concept that brings many relevant themes to CVR and haptics underneath its umbrella. The concept refers to an audience feeling of aliveness whenever oneself interacts with a human or non-human event or a medium. This research allowed 10 participants to engage with CVR movies with manually created haptic feedback and carried out interviews about their experience. Findings suggest that haptics in CVR movies is able to create a general audience experience of liveness through the feelings of immersion, connection, presence and interactivity that are created in accordance with the CVR environment. Further research can be carried out into different CVR movies from different genres that include local and/or global diegetic haptic effects in order to reach to a broader conclusion.