Virtual Reality and Olympic Games

the new media technological experiences from the summer 2016 and winter 2018 Olympic Games editions

Abstract

Olympic Games, communication and media have had a strong relationship throughout history, contributing to social and technological transformations of great cultural impact. In this article, in order to identify the evolution of the transformations in the Olympic narratives and their broadcasting, we propose an exploratory analysis of how virtual reality contents was present and used in two editions of the Olympic Games: Rio de Janeiro 2016 (summer) and Pyeongchang 2018 (winter). With that in mind, a brief history of the appropriations of communication technologies was made during the mentioned editions. Finally, we sought to understand how virtual reality was used in the broadcastings through the collection of data from Twitter users while the competitions were ongoing.