Immersive storytelling and affective ethnography in virtual reality

Virtual reality (VR) storytelling, particularly in its nonfictional modes, promises a sensory immersion among others whose lives and ways of being privileged viewer might not otherwise experience. In this essay, by focusing on the Emmy-nominated 2018 VR film Traveling While Black, we explore how immersive power storytelling can enact ethnographic encounters premised less impulse to extract meaning from other people their life than affective force with an unfolding experience both similitude difference. Without wishing overstate VR’s empathy-inducing potential, suggest that situating viewers at paradoxical threshold between proximity distance, derives part narrative form capable fostering nonappropriative relations.