Stories with Style: Narrative Virtual and Imaginary Spaces of Reading Fiction in Virtual Reality

Achieving the feeling of enjoyment from a reading activity might be harder for consumers due to their gradual adaptation to digital media that provide fast and intense experiences. To preserve the reading tradition with the help of digital technologies, we focus on adapting fiction to virtual reality (VR). This study investigates how VR readers perceive differences between narrative absorption and presence, how their individual ability to get absorbed by narratives affects their VR reading experience, and howa visually saturated VR space influences their imagination.We conducted a mixed methods study (n = 42) using our VR reading prototype. The results showthat the VR reading experience was perceived as symbiotic between the text and visuals and that the mental imagery of individual readers adapted to the visual style of the VR scene.