How to use interactive quizzes as a VR storytelling tool
In this post, I will explain how I used free VR/360 editor Fader’s hotspots to create an immersive news game.
Minsk has one of the most peculiar museums I’ve ever visited. The museum basically consists of one room filled to the brim with sculptures — 283, to be exact. They mostly portray communist heroes: Marxes, Stalins and a whole heap of Lenins. These portraits have one thing in common: They were all produced by the legendary Belarusian sculptor Zair Azgur (1908–1995).
The room *must* have been created with 360 photographs in mind.
When I visited the museum earlier this year as a tourist, I took some quick 360 snaps with the Gear 360 camera I had brought along. Back home, I realized that these photos could serve as the perfect vessel for a story that not only showcases a very interesting museum, but also gives an intriguing glimpse into the national identity of post-Soviet Belarus.
One problem: I had only three 360 pictures, taken in bad light conditions with a consumer-grade camera. How could I transform them into an interesting and informative story?
Enter the VR/360 editor Fader, which makes it easy to integrate text, audio, video and sound into complete 360 storytelling.
(Full disclosure: I have been affiliated with the development of Fader, through my work for Euronews and Deutsche Welle. These media houses are journalistic partners of Vragments, which is developing Fader, all under the financial umbrella of Google’s Digital News Initiative.)
Let me take you through how I created a 360 news game driven forward by quiz dynamics on the basis of three 360 photos. You can experience the story through this link:
A quick bit of context: Zair Azgur was a celebrated Belarusian artist and a dedicated communist. He remains a national icon to this day. Unlike many other post-Soviet countries, Belarus has not cut ties with its communist past. Lenin statues still watch over the city halls of most Belarusian towns. The country’s president, Alexander Lukashenko, who has earned the moniker “Europe’s last dictator” as political opposition is routinely squashed by the Belarusian KGB, orients his policies toward Russia.
Using Fader for 360 quizzes
The idea to create a quiz sprung from the limitation that I had only three 360 pictures to work with, though those pictures contained a wealth of information I wanted to impart. I needed a way to dose out information that would keep the readers interested even if the 360 material didn’t change.
In this situation, Fader’s hotspots are very handy, because they offer the user a way to interact with the story. Combining this with a quiz dynamic gives the audience both control and motivation to continue through the story.
The screenshots above showcase only a small part of the scene. If you enter the story and look around, you will see additional informative assets that change as the scene changes.
In fact, every time a user enters a new scene, a lot has changed.
I achieved this by taking advantage of how easy Fader makes it to change the assets (2D photo/video, sounds, texts) added on top of scenes.
I used circles to draw the user’s attention to new elements in the picture; text to give the user new information; and hotspots to guide the story forward.
I also used the option of having scenes without any 360 content at all, simply adding assets on top of the default background:
I think the combination of communist sculptures and an infotainment quiz makes a compelling end product, but I’m always intrigued to hear your opinions. Please do drop me a line on Twitter! (@olekrogsgaard)
During my work, I learned an important Fader pro tip, which I’ll end this post with.
Plan scene orientation ahead!
This task is easy to overlook when you are in the middle of creating an exciting Fader story. But planning a bit ahead can save you a lot of work later on — I speak from bitter experience!
The way Fader operates, user orientation is always controlled entirely by the user. The creator can rotate scenes, sure, but users always enter a new scene looking in the same direction they did when exiting the previous scene. If they were looking to the right in the old scene, they will enter the new scene looking to the right (helpfully, the Fader editor always tells the creator which way is back, front, left and right).
Hotspots are a godsend in that they give us control over where the users are looking when they enter a new scene. If the hotspot is placed to the right in a scene, you can rotate your new scene accordingly, so your users look at the thing you want them to look at.
Here’s where planning ahead proves valuable: If you decide that a hotspot in the first scene would be better placed elsewhere, you might have to adjust the rotation not just of the next scene, but of all subsequent 360 scenes and of all their assets. This last part is the real kicker!
In a story with ten scenes, changing a hotspot could lead you to waste a lot of time correcting placements you were happy with before.
So think ahead when you place those first hotspots!
In a nutshell: WebVR-based editors such as the free Fader are now so advanced that you can easily make interactive news games. This is a great option if you have a lot of information to convey, but not a lot of 360 material.
