An exploration of virtual reality storytelling with an HTC Vive
Team
- Stephanie Fawaz - Producer / Writer / Designer
- Tingwen Liao - 3D Artist
- Dave Palumbo - 3D Artist
- Jun Wang - UI/UX Designer
- Yiling Chen - Technical Artist
- Sarvesh Subramanian - Programmer
- Jingxuan Cao - Programmer
- Seth Glickman - Audio Designer
- Larry Cheng - Composer
Overview
Phantasm was a semester long project in the spring of 2016 at the Entertainment Technology Center. Our project client was movie studio Legendary Entertainment, creators of such films as the 300, the Nolan Batman series, Pacific Rim, and more. With the boom of virtual reality headsets becoming available to the general public in 2016, Legendary (along with several other story studios) has taken interest in using virtual reality as a new storytelling medium. As students at the ETC design and develop experiences as part of our curriculum, Legendary approached the program to help sponsor a project team that could create a demo experience that could show them ways one can tell stories unique to, or greatly enhanced by, virtual reality.
Legendary gave Phantasm complete creative control over the story we would be creating, simply giving us the IP of King Kong to work within. Our narrative experience wouldn't be related to Legendary's new movie in any particular way; it would simply function as a demonstration of the power and possibilities available to a narrative designer in VR. They also very generously provided us with equipment such as the HTC Vive and a Geforce Titan X graphics card to aid our development. Through our experience and insights we communicated with them throughout the semester, Phantasm's final deliverable was an experience that showed Legendary that cinematic visual storytelling can be integrated meaningfully into the interactive and immersive realm of virtual reality.
Narrative Design in VR
Our first action as a team was to brainstorm and decide the kind of story and core interactions we wanted our experience to include. Given our goal of demonstrating to Legendary the possibilities that are available in VR, we wanted our experience to heavily feature aspects and interactions that virtual reality makes very engaging and appealing. We began to look to existing narrative experiences in VR, many made by new VR story studios such as Oculus Story Studio, Penrose Studios, Baobab Studios, etc. As our team looked through experiences such as Henry, Lost, The Rose and I, and more, we found that many of the experiences were beautiful, but would often leave us feeling a little disengaged or hollow at the end.
In explaining our recurring reactions in the manner, I think it's instructive to examine the background and mindset of some of the creators of these experiences as well as our own. Many of the people currently creating and designing story experiences in VR are veterans of the film and animation industry; as such, they are taking many of the lessons and tricks that have worked reliably for them in their previous work and applying them in VR. While this knowledge is helping to create many beautiful experiences, VR demands more. It is a new medium, and trying to retrofit the techniques for a perfectly curated and non-interactive narrative will have limited effect, much as the initial jump from live theatre to film necessitated new techniques for the medium.
Meanwhile, at the ETC, we students were introduced to developing for VR in a game setting. What interactions were fun and satisfying in VR? How can you structure the game such that a guest that is new to VR can understand what is going on? When starting with this mindset, we can quickly reach a core truth about VR that makes it cool and exciting: VR is about transplanting you into a new world, immersing you in an environment that you could now be a part of. That is why VR is special, and why so many people are eager to create for it. In film, a guest spectates a story; in virtual reality, they become a part of it. And with this thinking, our team quickly agreed: we wanted our experience to be interactive.
We now had a core belief that would color the rest of our development - VR storytelling is most effective and compelling when interactivity is part of the core story. The main new innovations that VR brings to the table is its 360° space and its ability to tap into a human brain’s understanding of what is real and affecting the person in VR. When all the best talks and discussion about VR focus so much on presence, and the ability to keep the guest immersed, how can a VR narrative designer not try to create stories that involve the guest’s role and actions?
Phantasm came to the conclusion that there are three main principles to keep in mind when designing VR narratives; all design decisions should feed into one or more of these three components:
- Narrative: the plot events and worldbuilding details
- Immersion: the belief that the guest is a part of the world the experience puts forth
- Intuitiveness: how well a guest is able to deduce and perform the actions that move them through the experience of their own power and volition
All three of these components feed into the experience equally, and none of them is superior or of higher priority than the other. But because many people creating VR story experiences come from film and animation, intuitiveness can be a principle they are less familiar developing with. They may shy away from including it for fear that it cannot be achieved, and interactivity becomes minimal or clunkily railroaded in. But VR wants to be interactive, so interaction cannot be shied away from without discarding an important aspect of VR as a whole. Thus, all three principles must be embraced, and intuitiveness must be kept at the forefront of VR narrative development.
Story Principles and Progression
With an interactive story that used the IP of King Kong, we needed to decide what kind of features and interactions could best serve a compelling story in virtual reality. We found, through our research into virtual reality experiences, that size is conveyed very viscerally in VR. Particularly with a King Kong character, we could incorporate size into our story in a very meaningful way. It also helped us naturally extrapolate an interaction that could be used for an emotional turn - you can initially interact with and manipulate animals much smaller than themselves, then have that turned on you in the end with King Kong picking you up instead.
This reversal of power is a very powerful story arc, and one that plays in naturally with the feeling of awe and terror that typically is desired when portraying King Kong in a story. So in order to allow this physical and emotional reversal to happen in a natural way, the role of the guest had to be one such that it would make sense for them to be picking up much smaller animals. I thus wrote the basic premise of the story such that you, the guest, were on King Kong's native Skull Island habitat as a wildlife researcher to study the local animal species. You would have a scanning tool that, once you had picked up the animal, would scan the animal's data and send them offsite.
Once we dropped you in the experience, a guest would see that their interface consisted of a grabbing tool to pick up animals as well as a scanner. These functions would tie naturally into their role as a character, and voiceover instructions would tell them about their role and the tools that they had. This voiceover dialogue had the added benefit of giving some background information on the guest as a character and emotional reactions to the story as a whole.
Plot Progression
Prior to King Kong's appearance, interacting with the smaller animals needed to follow a story arc that naturally led up to the Kong entrance at the end. They needed to establish the experience's setting and feed into your realizations about the environment around you. I decided that our experience would have a shifting tone that went along with the emotional reversal: Skull Island would start out wonderous and beautiful, but as you interacted with it, it would quickly prove itself to be eerie and dangerous.
To that end, we shaped the small animals you would interact with to facilitate this arc. We decided that the animals you encountered should all be different kinds of primates, to mirror King Kong and draw a connection in-universe that related Kong to these small animals. Below are the initial visual designs of the monkeys our artist created, and my notes on the details of their encounters and behaviors.
In brief, the encounters were structured specifically to make the guest feel more and more unsettled and fearful as they go through the experience. The first monkey reacts to you shyly, getting scared when you pick it up. Its timidity doubles as a safe environment for a guest to understand and intuit the grab and scan mechanics. The second is to shock you, acting much more aggressively and screaming at you when you pick it up. The third encounter is to convey danger, with the monkey's design and behavior hitting more in the uncanny valley and having it break your tools when you have scanned it. Their final disappearance leads to silence, and then the footsteps of King Kong begin.