The Metamorphosis of the Reader in Virtual and Augmented Reality Story Worlds: Reconstructing Narrative Consciousness

Abstract

Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, and Immersive Media enable users to experience literature and mass media content through digital interfaces that go beyond conventional interfaces. This paper outlines how these technologies create new narrative consciousness through active reader interactions and engagement with story worlds and the environment rather than passive observation. Through the lens of virtual and augmented reality, immersive renditions of Alice in Wonderland and Frankenstein are used to examine and create sensory-based reading experiences through digital narratology and reader-response theory. An immersive reader acts as a posthuman messenger who navigates a digital environment, eliminating the traditional borders between authors and readers for a common understanding of the written text. Immersive literary media development allows authors to create new storytelling methods that enable readers to experience an interactive shared reading experience. This paper explores how readers become immersed in and experience so-called ‘immersive literary environments’ and how these environments are changing the traditional concept of solitary reading. Immersive environments in literature can change reading from a passive act to an interactive, even embodied and participatory experience, in which the reader is actively involved in shaping the meaning of the narrative within the constructed environment of the story world. The paper draws upon established methods from literary studies and the digital humanities, including digital narratology, reader-response, and posthuman studies, with a particular emphasis on how immersive environments provide new insights into and forms of narrative and narrative consciousness. This conceptual paper identifies areas for subsequent empirical and interdisciplinary studies, including a full reader-reception study of immersive environments, potential uses of immersive environments in formal education, issues of accessibility, and significant ethical concerns. Finally, this paper identifies the developing field of AI-supported immersive environments for literary purposes and the potential and implications of this developing space.