Landscape and Narrative In Virtual EnvironmentsPlaceholder (original) (raw)
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Placeholder: Landscape and Narrative In Virtual Environments
Proceedings of the second ACM international conference on Multimedia, 1994
Experiences are said to take place. One comes to know a place with all one’s senses and by virtue of the actions that one performs there, from an embodied and situated point of view. The mind, observes naturalist Barry Lopez, is a kind of projection within a person of the place which that person inhabits; “Each individual undertakes to order his interior landscape according to the exterior landscape.” The environment proceeds to record our presence and actions and the marks that we place there—this is a reciprocal affair. PLACEHOLDER is the name of a research project which explored a new paradigm for narrative action in virtual environments. The geography of PLACEHOLDER look inspiration from three actual locations in the vicinity of Banff National Park in Alberta, Canada–the Middle Spring (a sulfur hot spring in a natural cave), a waterfall in Johnston Canyon, and a formation of hoodoos overlooking the Bow River. Three-dimensional videographic scene elements, spatialized sounds and words, and simple character animation were employed to construct a composite landscape that could be visited concurrently by two physically remote participants wearing head-mounted displays.
The 11th International Conference of the Arab Society for Computation in Architecture, Art and Design, 2023
Designing a virtual environment within a digital game occupies a large part of the design procedure, requiring holistic attention and a broad arrangement of the game constituents. Considering other design disciplines, they occupy a unified design methodology; however, a comprehensive literature review reveals the lack of the intended design methodology in the digital game domain's virtual environment development, despite a currently proposed theoretical methodology trying to dissolve the issue. Hence, this research aims to determine the industry's requirements and provide a set of assets included in current digital games as an initial step of providing such a design methodology for the domain. In this regard, the researchers reverse-engineered ten selected digital games, understanding the current condition of digital games via adopting the mentioned currently available design methodology. This dataset reveals a lack in the assets of the story layer in the recent digital games, despite their focus on being story-based. This dilemma leads to long text or speech conversations between game characters, disrupting the players while following the game. The current design focuses on environmental resources only, however, as a virtual landscape, the story needs to be reinforced to be a balanced and well-designed game. Hence, increasing the ratio of the assets in this layer will advance the games' interactivity. Also, as future work, this data set could pave the way for a digital game industry design tool regarding the virtual environment.
EVA 2008 London Conference ~ 22-24 July NARRATING THE PAST Virtual Environments and Narrative
This paper explores how traditional narrative language used in film and theatre can be adapted to create interactivity and a greater sense of presence in the virtual heritage environment. It focuses on the fundamental principles of narrative required to create immersion and presence and investigates methods of embedding intangible social histories into these environments. These issues are explored in a case study of Greens Mill in the 1830's, interweaving the story of the reform bill riots in Nottingham with the life of George Green, mathematician and proprietor of the Mill.
Video games have been the focus of discussion by researchers of gaming and narratology regarding their narrative capabilities for quite some time. While some researchers argue that interactive media such as video games can not contain narratives due to their inherent nature, others suggest that when analyzing video games as a narrative medium a different approach may also be considered. Given that the sequence of events that are presented to the user are not as ordered as they are in traditional narratives, it can be surmised that the traditional definition of narrative (a sequence of events) would not apply in the case of video games. However this should not mean that the medium can not contain narrative qualities, it only raises the need to a new approach for the consideration of narratives in video games. In this thesis I suggest that instead of using the traditional narrative arc as a basis for evaluation for narratives in video games, one may also consider the indigenous qualities of the medium itself in terms of its narrative capabilities. Focusing on environment design in virtual worlds by examining how they are designed, authored and presented to the user; and how they are tied to the narrative design of a game, I aim to point out the ways in which game mise-en-scénes are used as storytellers in their own rights.
2000
In this paper we discuss issues involved in creating art and cultural heritage projects in Virtual Reality with particular reference to one interactive narrative, 'The Thing Growing'. In the first section we will briefly discuss the potential of VR as a medium for the production of art and the interpretation of culture. In the second section we describe 'The Thing Growing' project. In the third section we discuss building an interactive narrative in VR using XP, an authoring system we designed to simplify the process of producing projects in VR. In the fourth section we will discus some issues involved in presenting art and cultural heritage projects in VR.
At the threshold into new worlds. Virtual reality game worlds beyond narratives.
NECSUS_European Journal of Media Studies, 2019
Virtual and Augmented Reality systems are becoming increasingly popular in our everyday lives. Although these systems are extraordinary examples of the new role played by the human body in digital media ecologies much of the academic scholarship conducted in this area tends to interpret such phenomena from a narrativist standpoint. Such approaches often overlook the essential characteristics of non-narrative media. As a counter-strategy, we propose virtual fictionality – a concept emphasising central aspects of worldliness in VR-based works that lie beyond the narrative paradigm. The aim of the paper is to outline virtual fictionality as a particular world-making strategy of digital games that turns players into configurators.
Narrative Objects in Virtual Reality
2020
This chapter questions what differentiates interactive narratives in virtual reality, proposing spatial storytelling as a dimension natural to the medium. We analyze Offland, a project which consisted in the creation of a fictional world and a virtual reality experience, to explore this medium’s immersion and storytelling. The lessons taken from user testing help understanding how goals, exploration, linearity and interactivity relate to the fictional immersion and experience. From there we look at the structure of space and narratives as constructed by virtual objects with narrative value. It is clear that interactive storytelling is based on modularity (Miller in Digital storytelling : a creator’s guide to interactive entertainment. CRC Press 2014; Murray in Hamlet on the holodeck: the future of narrative in cyberspace. The Mit Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts 2017), and when looking at the spaces, events and action points, objects are what sustain these modules. Objects can be ess...
Virtual unreality: storytelling in virtual environments
2003
On one hand, we oppose reality to fiction. Our everyday experience, people rather than fictional characters, the plausibility of events, things whose existence can be supported by material evidence. On the other hand, we oppose reality to illusion, defined, to paraphrase Wittgenstein, as the bewitchment of our thoughts by our senses. We believe, at least in our everyday life, that there are objective states of affairs, faithfully turned into cognitive content through our sense-data.
Telling Stories within Immersive Virtual Environments
Leonardo, 2013
Portraying an unfolding story within an immersive virtual environment (IVE) is difficult: In an IVE, participants can pay attention to and interact with whatever they choose within the scene. Moreover, the decisions taken by virtual characters must appear consistent with their personalities and motivations but also take into account the human participants' actions, whenever relevant. Finally, the results of the interactions should satisfy a pre-established plot. In this article, the authors introduce a new two-part approach that addresses the dilemma regarding freedom of action and narrative.