VIRTUAL REALITY IN FILM AND TELEVISION PRODUCTION: A BIBLIOMETRIC - INFORMED LITERATURE REVIEW OF WEB OF SCIENCE PUBLICATIONS
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.35631/IJIREV.826051Keywords:
Bibliometric Review, Cinematic Virtual Reality, Film Production, Immersive Media, Television Production, Virtual RealityAbstract
Although virtual reality (VR) has increasingly influenced audiovisual production practice, the intellectual structure, research trends, and thematic development of VR applications in film and television production remain insufficiently mapped. This study aimed to analyse the characteristics of VR research related to film and television production indexed in the Web of Science Core Collection, applying bibliometric performance analysis, citation analysis, keyword analysis, and thematic mapping. A title-field search combining a VR term block and a film and television term block retrieved 243 documents on 29 June 2026. The records were restricted to English-language articles and early-access articles and screened for topical relevance, resulting in 60 articles for analysis. The analysis examined publication trends, source journals, Web of Science categories, citation patterns, contributing regions, author-keyword structures, and the thematic evolution of the field. The results showed that the corpus was recent, with most articles published from 2017 onward and an output peak in 2025. The Journal of Screenwriting and Frontiers in Virtual Reality were the most frequent sources, and the Web of Science categories were dominated by computer science alongside film, radio and television. Mainland China contributed the largest share of corresponding-author articles, indicating the growing role of Asian research communities in shaping VR production studies. The most-cited article examined movie editing and cognitive event segmentation in VR video, suggesting that early scholarly impact has favoured the craft and perceptual questions of the medium. Seven themes were identified, namely production pipelines and virtual production; cinematography and directing; editing and sound in post-production; narrative, storytelling and screenwriting; viewer experience, presence and guidance; social and live-television applications; and education and training for production. The study provides a production-oriented map of this emerging field and a research agenda for future investigations, particularly multi-database syntheses and primary empirical studies of production and post-production learning outcomes.
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