Characteristics of Digital Fashion Communication using Immersive Virtual Reality
Eun Kyoung Yang, Jee Hyun Lee · The Korean Society of Costume · 2018
Fashion design has attempted to create a new type of interactive communication design using advanced digital media to respond to rapidly changing consumer trends. In order to understand the evolution of contemporary fashion communication, this study sought to analyze the characteristics of immersive VR-based fashion communication that provides the most advanced interactive communication experience. Based on our review of the literature, we analyzed the operational categories of the interactive experience of immersive VR-based communication and classified them into three categories: speed, scope, and mapping of interactivity. Based on this categorization, we identified the four major characteristics of digital fashion communication that uses immersive VR: emotional features, spatial extensibility, personalization, and actualization, wherein “emotional feature” refers to a feature that stimulates a user’s perceived and emotional curiosity based on a multi-sensory commitment; “spatial expansibility” describes the constant reconstructing of and response to a large amount of information through the VR environment without time and space constraints; “personalization” indicates that individual users form their own creative narratives as a central agency of communication; and “actualization” means that the process and results of communication form a new current context that is inseparablely related to the space-time concept newly introduced by immersive VR. The results of this study will contribute to the expansion of research on digital fashion communication and can be used by fashion designers and companies as a theoretical basis for planning fashion communication using virtual reality.