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360° video and Virtual Reality are powerful techniques for giving viewers a sense of 'Being There' [1], and are becoming increasingly popular. However, giving the viewer the freedom to look around also results in a reduced ability for filmmakers to direct the viewer's attention, a serious impediment to successfully telling a story within a 360° environment. We have created a number of 360° clips, filmed in such a way as to demonstrate and test several unobtrusive techniques for directing a viewer's attention within a 360° panorama. We have evaluated these techniques in a user study in which participants viewed these clips using a head-mounted display. Qualitative and quantitative data from these tests have been analysed to evaluate the effectiveness of the different attentiondirecting techniques. Qualitative data was also captured to explore the effect of the camera being addressed directly, and the viewers' responses to action occurring at a range of distances.

A virtual reality scenario called "We Wait" gives people an immersive experience of the plight of refugees waiting to be picked up by a boat on a shore in Turkey to be illegally taken to Europe, crossing a dangerous stretch of sea. This was based on BBC news reporting of the refugee situation, but deliberately depicted as an animation with cartoon-like characters representing the refugees. Of interest was the level of presence that might be experienced by participants and the extent to which the scenario might prompt participants to follow-up further information about the refugee crisis. By presence we refer to both Place Illusion, the illusion of being in the rendered space, and Plausibility, the illusion that the unfolding events were really happening. The follow-up was assessed by whether and when participants accessed a web page that contained further information about the refugee crisis after the experiment. Two factors were considered in a balanced between-groups design with 32 participants. The Responsiveness factor was either "None" or "Look at." In the first the virtual characters in the scenario never responded to actions of the participant, and in the second they would occasionally look at the participant after the participant looked at them. The second factor was Embodiment, which was either "No Body" or "Body." In the No Body condition participants had no virtual body, and in the Body condition they would see a virtual body spatially congruent with their own if they looked down toward themselves. The virtual body was animated by the head tracking move the upper body. The results showed that the major factor positively contributing to presence was Responsiveness ("Look at"), and that Embodiment ("Body") may have contributed but to a lesser extent. There were important differences between men and woman in the degree of follow-up, with men more likely to do so than women. The experiment shows that adding in some simple responses in an immersive journalism scenario, where the characters acknowledge the presence of the participant through gaze, can enhance the degree of presence felt by the participants.

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Virtual Reality (VR) has been widely applied to cultural heritage such as the reconstruction of ancient sites and artifacts. It has hardly been applied to the reprise of specific important moments in history. On the other hand immersive journalism does attempt to recreate current events in VR, but such applications typically give the viewer a disembodied non-participatory role in the scene of interest. Here we show how VR was used to reconstruct a specific historical event, where a famous photograph was brought to life, showing Lenin, the leader of the 1917 October Russian Revolution, giving a speech to Red Army recruits in Moscow 1920. We carried out a between groups experimental study with three conditions: Embodied-where the participant was first embodied as Lenin and then later in the audience watching Lenin; Included-where the participant was not embodied as Lenin but was embodied as part of the audience; and Observing-where the participant mainly viewed the scene from a disembodied third person point of view. Twenty participants were assigned to each of the three conditions in a between-groups design. We found that the level of presence was greatest in the Embodied and Included conditions, and that participants were least likely to later follow up information about the Russian Revolution in the Observing condition. Our conclusion is that if the VR setup allows for a period of embodiment as a character in the scenario then this should be employed in order to maximize the chance of participant presence and engagement with the story.