Reading in Virtual Reality: an intercultural experiment with "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland"

Methods

Summary

This is a big collaborative project putting together the expertise of literary scholars, creative developers and psychologists. A convergence of different skills that will allow to design, develop and test reading in VR. 

Data will be collected via the technology employed (video recording; eye-tracking add on on the VR headset) and digital methods (Unity plugin code). We will record the gaze fixation patterns and the interactions with the elements in the environment (text and additional content).

Data analysis will combine quantitative descriptions of the first-person XR experience, with qualitative assessment from a third-person perspective, that is our analysis of readers’ patterns of interaction.

Pre Analysis Plan

We will orient the research activities using the framework for integrated transdisciplinary reading research developed by Mangen and Weel (2016), which is technologically and culturally agnostic, and thus able to accommodate reading in different media and sociocultural circumstances. The framework will be supplemented with specific models for the study of the literary experience: Jacobs's neurocognitive poetics model of literary reading (2015) is one of the best.