Immersion, intimacy and attention in VR

The Tribeca Film Festival is back, and this year there’s Storyscapes — a thoughtfully curated (by the wonderful Ingrid Kopp — go follow her on Twitter if you don’t already) selection of installations and VR pieces that explore a range of perspectives. What is it like to experience the world as a blind person? How would you survive in solitary confinement? What kinds of protection do we need from the Police?

The world of VR is still very new to me, but so far I’ve been struck by how important, and how moving, these stories can be. One of my first experiences with VR that reduced to me to a teary, blurry mess was Vrse.works ‘Clouds of Sidra’, where in just over 8mins you’re transported, front and centre, to the Zaatari Refugee Camp, home to 130,000 Syrians fleeing violence and war, and largely populated by children. And it’s the children who circle around you, guide you through their day-to-day reality in the camps, show you the spaces where they connect and play, and make your heart swell and dip. By being placed in the centre of this world, you really feel like you are there, the telepresence is complete, and in this way, the documentary overcomes one of the challenges that issues based organisations face when trying to mobilise public interest — that feeling that it doesn’t affect me, it’s happening far away, over there, in a place I don’t understand.

This headset, these headphones, this immersive story, it’s the best empathy machine we have right now.

Body language/holding your self: my friend and colleague Josephine clutches her own hands whilst immersed in a virtual experience of solitary confinement. It’s what you do when you feel really alone and perhaps a little frightened. It’s like saying, everything is going to be okay.

The works shown at Tribeca served as a good overview of the current possibilities within VR Storytelling, and the new ways that our hearts, minds and bodies can be engaged in this medium. As I explored, I reflected on some key principles that set this experience apart from others.

Performance

Watching and being watched, moving, circling, groping, grasping, don’t fall. We’ve all had these moments while engaging in VR. Depending on the location and setting, it can be a very public act of performance. There is often a crowd of people around you, curious about what you’re experiencing and eager to take their turn. While they’re waiting you might be spinning in 360 degrees, leaning in to a virtual floor or ocean, looking up and down and around, laughing or crying, or simply trying not to trip or get tangled in wires. Either way, it all feels very public until the glasses go on and the real world falls away.

I’m watching you, you’re swimming through the cavernous blue sea in Deep VR.

Bringing the body along for the ride

The body as interface? In Deep VR, an exploration of how we can use human breath as user control, you wear a sensor belt around your waste that detects the movement of your lungs. Inhale and you float to the top of the sea, exhale and you slowly fall to the sandy bottom. I spent a few moments really exhaling and holding my breath for longer than normal so that I could peer around the ocean floor a little more. I thought about yoga breathing and meditation and it felt a lot like diving, that act of trying to equalise and stabilise so that your body propels forward evenly in the water without bobbing up and down. It takes practice to get it right but when you do, you’ve found your flow.

Likewise, when you enter the Turning Forest, along with the usual headset and headphones, you’re also suited up with a backpack that vibrates in correspondence with the heavy movement of a friendly monster dragon that steps over to greet you and takes you for a ride on its back. Your eyes focus on the play button to start the experience.

Enclosing and intimacy

The world falls away, the surroundings fall away, there are no external distractions. No notifications, no additional tabs, no outside sounds, very few choice points. Most of the works that I’ve seen so far are fairly linear experiences, you choose what you want to focus your attention on, but generally there aren’t forked paths or complicated decision points. I think this lets your brain work, but work at a more relaxed and steady pace.

In addition there is a closeness like never before, leaning into the scene projected right into your eyes. Right there. You can almost touch…and then you realise how silly you would look to your audience if you did. But you still want to try anyway, everyone please go away so I can be silly.

Solitaire: it’s just you on this journey

There are no friends to laugh or cry with. The stakes are higher when you’re all alone, you’ve got to get through this, summon your courage and will. When you’re flying solo the powers of observation are higher, the reason why some people (I count myself among them) like to travel alone. You’re a maximum outsider looking in, there’s so much that can be learned from watching, uninterrupted. It’s the anthropologist in me I guess. But the opportunity to really tap into your own thoughts and feelings, to reflect and absorb everything to the uppermost limit, this is a big part of the power of VR.

I do wonder if in the future though, these experiences will take on more of a game like quality, and you’ll see your friends, or other strangers, also participating in the space, as avatars of some kind. It seems inevitable that this medium will evolve to be more ‘interactive’, in the way that we understand that term as web designers and programmers. There will be something lost (simplicity, relaxation), and something gained (control, agency) when this happens.

Shaping a physical space for VR

As a museum professional I also think about what makes a great architectural environment for digital learning and storytelling. In VR there are no objects to augment. You don’t necessarily need walls or even chairs, just a floor to stand on and some power and data points to hook into. That’s extreme minimalism. But I do believe that it’s better to set the tone, to create a space that you enter into, and reiterating what I mentioned above about the performative aspects of VR, a space that makes you feel safe and comfortable is really important.

The Turning Forest (L) is a fantasy cubby house that transports you into the forest. Inside you sit on synthetic grass chairs and are afforded some privacy from onlookers. In 6x9 (R) you sit in a brutalist 6x9 box to experience a virtual solitary confinement prison cell. Meta meta.

There were some other great experiences here that I haven’t mentioned above as they were not VR but are also worth a visit to Storyscapes to see. Among them, I enjoyed Seance, an interactive film project where the audience creates their own unique version of a film by gathering around a touch table and dragging in clips at random. Then everyone takes a seat and watches the result — in our case it was a schlocky bricolage of horror, the randomness of the sequence adding some humour.

Be sure to check out Intersection of I, from The Whiteness Project, where millennials who identify as white share their thoughts on what it means to be white. This is basically a web project adapted for installation, with some clever additions, like having your hand scanned on the way in, for your skin to become a part of a whiteness colour graph.

The Whiteness Project room — on the left is the white skin graph and tweet wall, on the right video stories with millennials. Out of shot is a microphone that you can speak a person’s name into to hear their story.

Please share your thoughts on VR below, I’m interested in evolving my initial ideas with you.