Virtual Reality as Theater — and the Viewer a Participant
A brief piece on VR for transformative storytelling
I once had the opportunity to take a course called Advanced Social Psychology. The course went into great detail about cinema and how it captures human behavior in a very explicit way. In this existential theory, we compare the world to a stage and the participant to an actor. Brenda Laurel covers this topic nicely in her book Computers as Theater which goes into vivid detail about how software systems can be designed like theater, not just from a metaphorical standpoint, but in a way that makes the user and computer partners in a transformative journey.
“Psychology explicates human behavior, while theatre represents it in a form that provides intellectual and emotional closure. Theatre is informed by psychology, but it turns a trick that is outside of psychology’s province through the direct representation of action.”
-Brenda Laurel
William Shakespeare once gave a speech called “All the World is a Stage”. In this poem he compares life to a performance, with actors exiting the stage upon death. I think that if Shakespeare saw virtual reality he would not only have a hard time understanding it, but would also be amazed at the potential for storytelling. This is because in VR you have the opportunity to make the viewer a part of a performance in a way that is not disruptive to other viewers.
A few weeks ago I helped rally together a massive group of people in the social experience VRChat. We ran a talent show. People did all sorts of things, including giving faux/satirical political speeches in an avatar of Donald Trump, playing a musical instrument, or performing virtual magic. I even got to see one of the best live covers of Tribute by Tenacious D. This was made more engaging by receiving audience feedback. In traditional theater, speaking during a performance (thus disturbing other onlookers) is generally seen as taboo. However in this experience the audience was very vocal- likely due to how casual the even was, much like a comedy club. Thus, it’s easier for a performer to adjust their performance accordingly.
Extend this system into VR design and you can see how powerful feedback from the environment can be in guiding the user. If they are doing something correctly, the environment can react in a way never before possible in order to guide them forward. The same goes for when they do something wrong. The system can provide constraints or feedback that encourages them to try again.
Last week I had an opportunity to present at the AltSpaceVR Scenes and Screens festival 2018. I gave a speech on the User Experience of Virtual Reality. Throughout my presentation I was looking out into a sea of avatars, some of them with no facial expressions. Unlike VRChat, this was a very well-organized event and the audience was very polite. They were able to express themselves with emoji’s, some hearts and others claps. This symbolic representation of emotion allowed me to know when I should go into more detail about something, specifically when a topic caught people’s attention.
VR has an amazing opportunity to position the audience on the stage in a way that’s impossible with other mediums. When designing VR I think it’s really important for designers to be aware that participants are very much a part of the performance, that is, unless there’s a stage made directly available to separate the participant from spectators- they are very much a part of the scene, and whatever feedback the system gives provices will be interpreted by them. In this respect, I want to quote Jaron Lanier:
“Your most important canvas is not the visual world but the user’s sensorimotor loop. Stretch it, shrink it, twist it, and interlace it with loops from other people.”
Consider Beat Saber. This game pits the user against a virtual environment and invites them to release themselves and dance in it. The immersive nature of virtual reality cuts out unnecessary stimulus from the outside world and instead directs the participants attention to the stage on which they are placed. From there, it is a dance between the participants abilities, system feedback, beautiful neon aesthetics, haptics, and stereoscopic sound.
I think it will be very interesting to see what new stories will be told from within VR, especially once conventions for free-locomotion are in place, as well as residual issues related to latency, rendering and tracking. These breaks in immersion which cause user stress are more likely to break the illusion of presence- which VR as theater relies so heavily on.
