The grammar of immersion: a social semiotic study of
nonfiction cinematic virtual reality
Doyle, PhillipORCID: 0000-0002-1564-6686
(2023)
The grammar of immersion: a social semiotic study of
nonfiction cinematic virtual reality.
PhD thesis, Dublin City University.
Cinematic virtual reality (CVR) is an audio-visual form viewed in a virtual reality headset. Its
novelty lies in the way it immerses its audience in highly realistic 360° visual representations.
Being camera-based, CVR facilitates many of the practices of conventional filmmaking but
fundamentally alters them through its lack of a rectangular frame. As such, CVR has garnered
scholarly attention as a ‘frameless’ storytelling medium yet to develop its own language. The form
has gained traction with producers of nonfiction who recognize CVR’s capacity to transport
audiences to remote social worlds, leading to claims that equate CVR’s immersion with a social
and emotional response to its filmed subjects. A strand of CVR scholarship has emerged,
grounding nonfiction CVR theoretically and critiquing such deterministic claims. Broadly
speaking, these parallel strands of inquiry point to a common concern with CVR’s semiotics; as
the meaning potential of the 360° format, and the social aspects of its use in documenting reality.
Currently however, there appears to be a lack of systematic analyses that foreground CVR’s
semiotics.
This study addresses this gap by using social semiotic methods to complement these threads of
inquiry, subsuming them into a holistic account of CVR’s semantics. Utilizing systemic functional
methods, multimodal discourse analyses were performed on nonfiction CVR texts addressing
core research objectives. The first objective is the systematic description of CVR as a semiotic
technology, and the configuring of discourse through its novel 360° modality. The CVR spectator
is described for their role in the real-time construction of low-level meanings. Higher-level
concepts further characterize CVR texts as technologically enabled, virtual sites of social
discourse. The second research objective concerns clarifying the implications of CVR for
nonfiction practitioners. Nonfiction discourse is conceptualized as the negotiation of semiotic
autonomy, independence, and control, between viewing spectator, filmed subject, and CVR author
respectively. The third objective concerns the development of an analytical approach tailored
specifically for CVR. Extant systems from image, text, film, and action analyses are reflexively
applied, appraised, and adapted for use in the study of CVR and new frames are presented to cater
for the 360° modality.
The findings show CVR to be an inherently logical, contextualizing form, where the spectator has
a degree of sense-making autonomy in the construction of representational and social meanings.
This semantic autonomy is found to camouflage the deeper textual constructions in what appear
as ‘reality experiences’. The repercussions for the CVR producer are the indeterminacy of
meanings which are ‘at risk’ in particular ways when conventional framing methods cannot be
utilized, and when the spectator is given reflexive agency to make meaningful connections across
the 360° image. Systemic functional analytical methods prove flexible enough to be applied to the
texts, and open enough for the study to present additional systems and frames for a more fulsome
approach to the analysis of CVR.