# Predictors of Engagement in Virtual Reality Storytelling Environments about Migration
## 1 Introduction  
Engagement can be viewed from the behavioral, cognitive, and emotional dimensions [1], which refer to humans' actions, thoughts, and feelings, respectively [2]. Engagement is a multifaceted and multidimensional concept. One of the well-known definitions of engagement is the one suggested by [PERSON], [PERSON], and [PERSON] [3]: engagement is a multidimensional concept with three dimensions. The first one is the behavioral dimension, which refers to the involvement in academic and extracurricular activities and is linked to positive learning outcomes. The second dimension is the emotional one, which refers to the positive and negative affective reactions in the classroom, to the school, and to teachers. The third dimension is the cognitive dimension, which refers to making the best effort to succeed in learning activities by using appropriate self-regulated learning strategies. In the context of this study, we define engagement as the degree of involvement in an activity created by a combination of personal factors and technological affordances of the medium used for an interactive experience. Engagement has been investigated in different contexts, such as education [4; 5; 6], health [7; 8; 9], and consumer behavior [10; 11], among others. In recent years, several studies have reported the use of virtual reality (VR) as a medium for analyzing the effects of immersive technologies on user engagement. Moreover, in the VR industry, engagement can be viewed as a key experience indicator [12]. In this article, we explore factors influencing engagement in VR, particularly in a VR storytelling environment involving human migration stories. Human migration is a way in which people escape from pressures and problems to find new opportunities that cannot be encountered in the original contexts, and it represents biographical and contextual partitions in a human's lifetime [13]. Telling migration stories helps empower people and make them aware of the realities that many migrantsgo through. In this context, storytelling has been used as a strategy for narrating vivid ideas, beliefs, experiences, and life lessons [14]. Its reflexive nature gives people the opportunity to bring back memories of their own or others' lived experiences [15]. Moreover, creativity is a fundamental factor in constructing digital storytelling, and a story can be represented in multiple formats using different technologies. For instance, [PERSON] and [PERSON] [16] introduce a game learning experience based on immersive digital storytelling addressing the topic of game developer competency. [PERSON] et al. [17] developed a mobile augmented reality (AR) application that gives visitors information about the story and meaning behind the frescoes inside a basilica. Despite the importance of the influence that engagement might have in VR scenarios, there remains a paucity of evidence on the factors influencing engagement in VR storytelling scenarios. There have been few studies that have assessed some constructs related to engagement in VR in other contexts. Nonetheless, to advance research in the field, in this study, we investigate how other factors associated with a VR experience might predict engagement in a migration storytelling environment. Thus, this study aims to identify the predictors of engagement during participants' use of a VR storytelling environment. In that regard, this study provides insights into the factors that influence participants' engagement. The main contribution of this study lies in the identification of how some aspects of the VR experience positively affect engagement. In this context, the main research question that drives this study is: What are the predictors of engagement in VR storytelling environments? The rest of this paper is organized as follows: Section 2 describes the related work. Section 3 describes the hypotheses' development. Section 4 describes the methodology, participants, research design, and details of the intervention.