Oral Storytelling in the Digital Future: Implications for Distraction, Time Perception and Immersion

Oral storytelling remained the most popular storytelling format throughout the history of humanity until it was replaced by books, and thereafter by their digital versions (i.e. e-books). However, in congruity with the predictions of the medium theorists, the recent times have seen a resurgence of orality through the remediated forms of audio books or digital storytelling. This paper does a comparative study between the immersive capabilities of a 3D digital animated oral storyteller and the normal audio-book style narration. We present an initial prototype of a 3D digital animated oral storyteller with certain elementary quasi-human capabilities and measure the degree of immersion experienced by the user in comparison to the immersion experienced through a normal audio narration. Immersion has been gauged through objective measures including eye-tracking, and subjective measures (questionnaires). The results from the objective eye tracking data suggest that the viewers tend to be less distracted by unrelated visuals in an interface with a 3D digital animated oral storyteller than the one without it and therefore have a higher degree of immersion. But certain contradicting conclusions arise out of the subjective narrative engagement scale or self-reporting. While the study shows that the presence or absence of a 3D virtual storyteller significantly alters the experience of story consumption, there is scope for further study that looks into the anomalies for the measurement of immersion or distraction and retrospective time estimation.