Satisfaction and Willingness to Consume Immersive Journalism: Experiment of Differences Between VR, 360 Video, and Article

Immersive journalism has been touted to revolutionize journalism due to its ability to afford a multi-modal engrossing experience. However, hardly any experiments have been conducted whether consumers' satisfaction and consequent intentions to use immersive journalistic media may differ from traditional forms of journalistic content. Therefore, in this study, we investigate the differences in satisfaction and continued use intentions between article, 360 video and VR-based interaction with content. The data was collected via a randomized controlled laboratory experiment with between-subjects design (N = 87). Participants were randomly assigned to reading a written article based on the video (article) and watching the video on a computer screen (2D 360) or in mobile VR (VR 360). The collected data consisted of demographics (age and gender) and reported satisfaction and intention to continue use. Results suggest that those who were assigned to VR 360 had higher intentions to continue use, but not greater satisfaction than those in the other two conditions. However, the intention was predicted to an extent by satisfaction as suggested by previous literature. Finally, age and gender did not predict continued use. These findings imply that users prefer the new media technology for consuming journalism content and support previous findings of the relationship between satisfaction and intention to continue use. Finally, avenues for further research are presented.