Technological affordances versus narrative delivery?: the practice of recent virtual reality storytelling

Abstract

ABSTRACT Subsequent to virtual reality (VR) technologies becoming cheaper and more accessible, a new generation of practitioners have focused on the affordances and opportunities that VR can offer to storytelling. A recurring concern is how to understand the value of VR’s interactivity and how its additional, spatialised, audiovisual data can aid storytelling rather than provide surplus distraction. By focusing on three specific areas – interactive affordance; authorial and user agency; and first and third-person perspectives – this article outlines how practice in the field of VR production can lead to inductive responses to these issues, as well as their relationship with the historical questions that are raised around the implementation of new audiovisual technologies. Through a discussion of a recent VR project, Embodied, this article considers how VR technology and content can combine to explore new interactive narrative possibilities.