Immersive technologies in journalism, under study

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The URJC Ciberimaginario group has detected that the metaverse and the technologies applied to immersive journalism are already being studied from multiple perspectives and that it is necessary to promote new fields of research.

Irene Vega

Immersive journalism is a form of media communication that has emerged in recent years and is based on the use of extended reality systems to produce its content, such as virtual, augmented or mixed reality. The recent use of these technologies and their constant evolution have given rise to numerous studies aimed at understanding and exploring the results of their uses in the field of communication.

As a result of these investigations, the URJC Ciberimaginario group has carried out a systematic review of scientific literature to explore the way in which journalism and the media use these immersive technologies to develop their products. “The main objective of the research has been to describe the scientific characteristics of the publications that make up the state of the art on immersive technologies applied to journalism and to determine, in this way, the current state of scientific studies in this field and the level of maturity of the research,” says Alberto Sánchez Acedo, researcher with the Ciberimaginario group.

The results obtained, published in the magazine Multimodal Technologies and Interaction, show that the application of immersive technologies in journalism is a growing area of research. Furthermore, one of the main results is that, once the recovered literature has been analyzed, the metaverse and the technologies applied to immersive journalism are already being studied from different perspectives. In this sense, the research team concludes that "it is necessary to continue researching in this area to understand the development and application of these technologies in this sector and to continue developing studies aimed at product prototyping." Therefore, the conclusions open the door to carrying out new studies aimed at the development of real prototypes.

How was the data collected?

Once a systematic literature review was carried out to retrieve scientific publications, the research team carried out a qualitative and quantitative analysis of the studies. First, retrieved from the databases Web of Science, Scopus y Google Scholar -via software Publish or Perish 8- a total sample of 61 scientific publications. “Through an online analysis sheet, we analyze the hypothesis variables and research questions of the study, as well as the study disciplines and techniques for the development of global experience, the professional sector, the type of research, the methods sampling and conclusions,” explains Sánchez Acedo.

This work is part of the project eCOMCIENCE (New interactive and immersive narratives to promote the circular economy and social innovation through scientific communication and citizen science) and the Aid program for industrial doctorates in the Community of Madrid.