Plans versus Situated Actions in Immersive Storytelling Practices (original) (raw)
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Critical Encounters with Immersive Storytelling
Critical Encounters with Immersive Storytelling, 2019
This introductory chapter considers some key themes, concepts and approaches that underpin the book. It uses existing scholarship to explore the terms 'immersion' and 'storytelling', noting that neither concept is bounded or stable. It examines why 'the immersive' is such a seductive concept in our present cultural, social, economic and political moment(s), and thus why its study is important. It also offers an overview of the book's structure. We (the authors) have both been researching at the intersection of immersion and storytelling for many years, exploring diverse connections between narrative, genre, environments and experience. Our joint perspective makes this book a unique resource; it is both critically and practically attuned, and offers ways into research design for immersive contexts. Such research raises complex methodological considerations which are often rendered invisible in the reporting of case studies, yet this book acknowledges and confronts them head on, making our reflexivity visible, and itself a productive resource. This introductory chapter considers some key themes, concepts and approaches that we return to throughout the book. It uses existing scholarship to explore what we mean when we talk about 'immersion' and 'storytelling', noting that neither concept is bounded or stable. It examines why 'the immersive' is such a seductive concept in our present cultural, social, economic and political moment(s), and thus why its study is important. It introduces key concepts that will underpin analyses in the book and begins to problematize meaningful distinctions between analogue/digital, physical/virtual and online/offline. Given the complexity of immersive storytelling as a research subject, we now offer four different approaches to sketch out where this books sits-the analogy, the experience, the history and the definition-before concluding with an overview of the book's structure. uncomfortable. We have had many conversations since that time, attempting to understand what was happening. Consulting scholarship has helped us little in our reflections on this immersive encounter: According to Matthew Reason the term 'immersive' is one with 'extremely tricky conceptual grounding' (2015: 272). Alison McMahon proposed in 2003 that the concept of immersion in video games had become 'an excessively vague, all-inclusive concept' (2003: 67) and Adam Alston has more recently observed that 'the immersive label is flexible' to the degree that it can 'jeapordize terminological clarity' (2013: 128). No clear definition exists, yet we all seem to have an idea of what we are talking about when we use that word 'immersive'.
Design-Driven Narrative: Using Stories to Prototype and Build Immersive Design Worlds
This paper examines the role of narrative in the process of interactive experience design, focusing on the potential uses of narrative in prototyping and iteration efforts to uncover deeper and more meaningful responses from users by engaging them in the co-creation of narratives of use around the design. We created a series of narrative fictions with embedded design concepts, and built low-fi prototype artifacts for directed storytelling sessions with twelve participants. We conclude with a discussion of findings regarding the opportunities to more effectively use narrative techniques and immersive storytelling to create valuable experiences between designers and users.
Exploring the usability of immersive interactive storytelling
2010
Abstract The Entertainment potential of Virtual Reality is yet to be fully realised. In recent years, this potential has been described through the Holodeck™ metaphor, without however addressing the issue of content creation and gameplay. Recent progress in Interactive Narrative technology makes it possible to envision immersive systems. Yet, little is known about the usability of such systems or which paradigms should be adopted for gameplay and interaction.
The World Building Framework for Immersive Storytelling Projects
EAEA14, 2019
This article explores issues associated with immersive storytelling in order to examine how the field of World Building can constitute a theoretical framework for practice in the context of VR-based and Full Dome artistic projects. With respect to immersion, the intent will be to interpret the concept of storytelling in relation with the recent formulation of the concept of extended reality (XR). The very concept of World Building is transauthor and transmedia by nature. The transauthor dimension of World Building resides in the idea of subcreation, i.e., designing environments and interaction rules that help create a storytelling basis for generating multiple stories. Once the universe has been conceived, stories written by different authors take shape through transmedia processes across multiple distribution media (film, video games, web, etc.). The question then arises: How can the World Building approach shape the construction of immersive experiences? The article sets out to answer this question, and in doing so, to contribute to the research on environmental storytelling.
The Next Innovation in Immersive [Actuality] Media Isn’t Technology – It’s Storytelling
2019
This paper explores the raison d'être of documentarians and journalists-that of creating emotional connections by transporting audiences "into the story." Enabling technologies for delivering such experiences have become faster, cheaper, smarter, and mobile. Collectively referred to as "immersive media," such technologies have become de rigueur in actuality storytelling. Initially promoted as "empathy machines" capable of fostering emotional engagement, problems in rationalizing journalisticstyle with immersive media's "designing technology" proved frustrating. What is presented here is a view of immersive media's "narrative technology" as a new storytelling ecology evolving with the aesthetics of immersion and (hopeful) content engagement that induces a state of narrative transportation, or "flow," in which user/participants are both immersed in and actively engaged with the storytelling.
Proceedings of the 2018 Designing Interactive Systems Conference
Immersive design fiction is a novel approach that embeds speculative interactions within a rich virtual reality (VR) storyworld. Immersive design fictions use VR to translate new design opportunities into story-driven, embodied experiences by positioning the participant as a character in a narrative world. This paper presents a case study of an immersive design fiction that depicts a fictionalized reimagining of an industry partner's work practices. This VR experience explores speculative interfaces for creative work and collaboration in the context of a fictional workplace environment. By placing design fictions within rich immersive contexts such as room-scale VR, researchers and practitioners can go beyond prototyping imagined interfaces to also speculate about the interaction rituals and surrounding social context within an experiential storyworld. This approach makes methodological and theoretical contributions to design fiction research by demonstrating a toolkit for exploring and reflecting upon the intersections between speculation, embodiment, and narrative context.
Stories within Immersive Virtual Environments
2012
How can we use immersive and interactive technologies to portray stories? How can we take advantage of the fact that within immersive virtual environments people tend to respond realistically to virtual situations and events to develop narrative content? Stories in such a media would allow the participant to contribute to the story and interact with the virtual characters while the narrative plot would not change, or change only up to how it was decided a priori. Participants in such a narrative would be able to freely interact within the virtual environments and yet still be aware of the main trust of the stories presented. How can we preserve the ‘respond as if it is real’ phenomenon induced by these technologies, but also develop an unfolding plot in this environment? In other words, can we develop a story, conserving the structure, its psychological and cultural richness and the emotional and cognitive involvement it supposes, in an interactive and immersive audiovisual space? I...
Immersive Interactive Narratives
2001
♣ The eight following partners constitute the art.live consortium: Université catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium; Casterman Edition S.A., Bruxelles, Belgium; Associação para o desenvolvimento das telecomunicações e técnicas de informática, Lisboa, Portugal; Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland; Fastcom Technology S.A., Lausanne, Switzerland; Association pour le Développement de l'Enseignement et de la Recherche en Systématique Appliquée, Paris, France; Université Joseph Fourier Grenoble 1, France; Centro Studi e Laboratori Telecomunicazion S.p.A., Torino, Italy. ABSTRACT
Interactive storytelling in a mixed reality environment merges digital and physical information and features. It usually uses an augmentation of the real-world and physically-based interaction to create an immersive experience that corresponds to the dramatic storyline of the interactive narrative influenced by the actions of the user. Immersiveness is a crucial aspect of such an installation, and can be influenced by multiple factors such as video, sounds, interaction and, finally, the density of all combined stimuli. We used one of the stages from our interactive ALICE installation to investigate immersiveness and its contributing factors in a between-group design with a special focus on the effects of interactivity, and the feedback and feedforward stimuli of the environment on the users' experiences. The study was carried out with 41 participants and the results showed that immersiveness not necessarily depends on the modality of stimuli, but instead on their time-density.