When cinema was invented, the first films heavily borrowed their style, artistic direction and characteristics from the theatre. The first film directors just filmed a stage, placing a fixed camera in an audience member’s seat (usually in the centre and a few rows back) while the set and actors were on a stage. The resulting view/framing of the film was the perspective of an audience member. It wasn’t until many years of experimentation, advancements and developments did film take on new formats, establish a formal language of framing, composition and perspective and cinematic storytelling evolved beyond the language of the theatre into mock-umentaries, binge-worthy tv series and even youtube personalities. Right now, VR is in these early stages, and like our media ancestors, we too are in the early stages of understanding its potential. Therefore, we believe that before we begin designing a VR experience, it is essential for us to take time to study and analyse the current state of the art in order to find principles to help guide us in creating an engaging and valuable VR experience. The goal of this research is to not only gain knowledge in VR, but also to use our findings to help the production and execution of a VR experience for the Montreux Jazz Nomad Project.
For our research and testing we used an Oculus Rift and gaming PC. We have tried other VR technologies, but our focus will be on the Oculus (and Oculus apps) because of our setup at the lab for experimentation. Since our experience (for the Montreux Jazz project) will be educative/emotionally engaging storytelling of historical events, we focused on storytelling and learning experiences as opposed to gaming ones.
During the month of October 2017, we tried over 32 VR experiences (which were official and approved by Oculus as they were available via the Oculus store). After experiencing each application, we wrote a case study for each, evaluating the content from traditional filming parameters (framing, composition, story arch, etc.) to user experience information (instructions, tutorials, training) and other variables (sound, point of view, physical gestures, software). You can find the information for each of the applications in the Case Studies section of this site.
After writing and reflecting on the experiences, we drew up a set of principles which we found as common themes throughout the different apps. These principles, we believe are core elements in creating engaging storytelling experiences in VR.
EEL VR Storytelling Research 