virtual reality

Cherlynn Low, writing for Engadget in “Johnnie Walker’s drunk-driving VR experience lacks subtlety”

The heavy-handedness of the video gets especially extreme at the end of the clip. As you look on at the victims of the crash, you start floating in the air, as if you were the spirit of someone who had just died. I know it’s supposed to be poignant, this moment where you’re thinking about the people who were just killed. But it was ultimately distracting and cheesy.

The idea of using VR to give the interactor a visceral experience of the consequences of drunk driving is potentially a good use of VR, a kind of story that only VR can tell. This implementation falls short, but it’s worth analyzing why.

It turns out that the way comedy and empathy work in VR is very different from film.

Saschka Unseld (Creative Director of Oculus Rift):

Saschka Unseld – Uncovering the Grammar of VR from Future Of StoryTelling on Vimeo.

Janet Murray (Inventing the Medium):

1. There is a tension between film and games as the model for VR.
2. Since the interactor’s experience of agency is always the most important design value for digital environments, games are a more productive starting point.
3. Hand controllers are key to success because they give us a presence in the virtual role, functioning as “threshold objects” when they mimic two-handed operations we can see.
4. Virtual vehicles are a promising approach to constraining and empowering interaction.
5. Documentary film approaches may work, shaping interaction as a visit (as I describe in Chapter 4 Immersion in Hamlet on the Holodeck). To be successful, designers need to invent:
   1. interaction conventions for navigating the space,
   2. cues to entice us to navigate,
   3. dramatic composition of the experience to rewards us for being in one place rather than another,
   4. a fourth wall equivalent to make clear what we can and cannot do.

If you’re at all interested in the narratology of VR, you need to read everything Janet Murray has written.