Strollytelling: Coupling Animation with Physical Locomotion to Explore Immersive Data Stories

With a growing interest in immersive data storytelling, there is an opportunity to explore story presentation and navigation techniques in virtual reality (VR) that can engage audiences as much as data story techniques have on conventional displays. We propose and explore “strolly”telling, a novel data storytelling technique that maps the story progression with the user/audience’s physical locomotion. Inspired by the conventional web-based technique for scrolling-based stories (i.e. scrollytelling), our technique tightly couples the user’s position in physical space to the animation frame of the data story. This technique leverages the natural tendency of humans to "walk and talk" while telling a story and requires users to engage with the content actively. This work defines strollytelling, design considerations, and a preliminary process for designing a strollytelling experience. A user study comparing strollytelling with virtual locomotion found that strollytelling was preferred by most participants and had higher self-reported immersion. We conclude with opportunities for strollytelling within the immersive data storytelling landscape.