Beyond virtual cultural tourism: history-living experiences with cinematic virtual reality

Virtual reality (VR) offers unprecedented opportunities for creating cultural tourism experiences that tell visitors emotionally engaging stories about the past. This paper focuses on cinematic virtual reality, the latest frontier of immersive storytelling rivalling feature films, which can immerse users into 360-degree films making them feel like living the story. Through a qualitative analysis of five projects, it explores how this new media form has been applied for cultural heritage storytelling and analyses the reactions of users to the historyliving experiences with an emphasis on their emotional responses. Based on the findings of the analysis, implications are discussed for the design of compelling VR experiences incultural tourism.