May 19, 4:30 – 5:20 pm
Kata Szita, Dublin City University
Adaptive Storytelling for Extended Reality
Virtual reality devices and platforms are marketed as tools with endless possibilities for everyone. However, they have often privileged white, able-bodied men (Harley, 2020) and equipment is designed for users of a limited set of demographic groups. For example, equipment design has often disregarded female physiology (e.g., interpupillarydistance, hormonal cycle), which increases the chance of cybersickness for female users (Stanney et al., 2020), and race, ethnicity, and age- related characteristics have been limited in avatar design in VR spaces, which enhances exclusion (Szita, 2022). Therefore, groups of users—including those with disabilities, neurodivergent traits, and people of minority groups—often experience physical or mental discomfort or need to compromise regarding their immersive experiences.
As part of a framework for outlining AI-based adaptive immersive experiences, this paper offers an interdisciplinary,human-centred approach combining cognitive and behavioural sciences, media studies, and human-computer interaction to present potential future directions toward universal design for storytelling in cinematic VR. Universal design reflectson broadening potential uses and enabling adjustments for any users to experience immersive content adapted to theirunique mental and physical traits and preferences.
The paper focuses on inclusive and universal immersive narrative experiences. As such, it investigates how storytelling formulas and interaction mechanisms can be adjusted to optimise sensory and cognitive load for each user’s accessibility needs. This may be achieved by changing the pace of narrative presentation, multimodal presentation modes (e.g., subtitles to spoken dialogues), and the repetition/replay of information. While such adjustments increaseaccessibility, this approach is not without challenges: by publishing this paper and interacting with fellow authors at thesymposium, I expect to start a fruitful discussion on how inclusion and increased accessibility can impact storytelling and narrative engagement as well as how an adaptive model like this can preserve the conveying of artistic intentions and narrative formulas.
Dr Kata Szita is an assistant professor of multimedia at the School of Communications, Dublin City University, and an affiliated researcher at the Insight Research Ireland Centre for Data Analytics, Ireland. Her research focuses on extended reality experiences and how they affect human-to-computer and human-to-human interactions: she haspublished widely about immersive and interactive storytelling, the impacts of virtual environments on cognitive andneural processes, social behaviours, identity, as well as the dilemmas around the prevalence of artificial digital agents and personal data collected in XR spaces. Currently, she leads interdisciplinary and cross-sector projects on accessible XR design.