Interactive Storytelling: Study of Audience, Author and Narrative Contribution in VR Animations

Virtual reality animation is a new trend whose narrative genre is interactive storytelling. On the one hand, it is similar to the cinema thus the author's decision on narration is at the discretion of the author, and the viewer has no role in ending the story, and on the other hand, it is similar to the gaming genre, and the viewer enters the story space through the displays on the head of virtual reality and can be a part of the story. It is the interactive form of the information that is appealing, but it is not the player's audience. In this case, virtual reality has a place between knowledge and instrumentality. In this new medium, in addition to narrative techniques, physical equipment is also effective in enhancing the engagement of the audience. By placing screens on its head, the audience enters a computer-modeled three-dimensional space, and with 360 degrees of freedom, it can see the scene in which the story is going to happen, the camera whose eyes are the audience is in his possession and not that of the director. At one hand, similar to cinema, in this particular type, it is the author who decides about narration and the participant has no say in the closure of the story; on the other hand, it is similar to games, in which a participant enters into the story space through screens s/he puts on his head and has the ability to pursue the parts of data which s/he finds interesting. It is interactive but the participant is not a player. In the discussion about the interactive storytelling, there have always been two philosophical attitudes: one is the user’s freedom in choosing the closure of the story, and the other is proposing the possibility of interaction in a fake way. In this paper, the emphasis is on the latter. VR is is the outcome of digital media and it seems has inherited most of its features; one of them is the logic of database which offers all of the information to the participant and unlike cinema’s use of montage, it doesn’t prioritize between them, and with the freedom of 360 degrees, participants can pursue the scene in which the story occurs. The viewer, thus, and not the director, controls the camera (the eyes of the participant). This paper focuses on how this tool can be used to create narrative animations, something more than the current usage, and if narrative animation can be produced in the VR, then, comparing with the classic narrative formats like movies and known interactive formats like games, how much the participant and the author’s share has been changed. With the presence of the participant in a narrative space, it is possible to produce a narrative animation in which the participant has an active role in creating narration without disturbing the author’s work as a whole. Paying attention to similar topics in interactive storytelling and comparing narrative in film and play help identify more narratives in this form.