Virtual San Storytelling for Children: Content vs. Experience

Abstract

This paper describes the development of a Virtual Environment (VE) for telling a traditional San story. The San are an indigenous hunter-gatherer people of southern Africa whose traditional lifestyle has become almost extinct. We present a study which gauges the effectiveness of a San storytelling VE with high-school students. We defined an effective cultural storytelling experience as one in which the story is understood and enjoyed. We explored the possibility of fostering an interest in the story's cultural context. We drew from a number of disciplines in this paper: archeology, film and VE authoring for the creation of our VE; educational theory and psychology research principles in our experimental methodology. In our study we evaluated the effectiveness of a storytelling VE in comparison to reading a story as text.We considered comprehension of the story, the amount of subsequent interest shown in the San culture and the level of enjoyment, boredom and confusion. We found that comprehension of the story was significantly higher for the text group than for the Virtual Reality (VR) group (F(1)