There is no Fourth wall

Like many people, one of the first things I did when I got my Oculus Rift Consumer Version was to try Henry.

Henry was one of the most hyped launch titles of the Rift. It was a short VR “film” created by Oculus Story Studio. It is a beautifully produced piece of animation made by some of the best animators and storytellers from movie companies like Pixar.

It tells the story of an incredibly cute, but sad and lonely hedgehog on his birthday. You see him in his little house on his birthday. He has prepared everything he needs for a party: cake, decorations and balloons, but he has no friends to share it with because everyone is afraid of his spines.

Henry is a wonderfully drawn out character in the tradition of Disney and Pixar. He is cute and full of personality, instantly likeable. Overall, it is a great piece of animation and in many ways a very worthy introduction to consumer VR.

But, but, but… it didn’t quite work as VR. There was something wrong.

At this point in the rhetorical argument I should probably say that I didn’t quite know what the problem was. The thing is, I had been doing VR and characters in particular for years, and knew exactly what the problem was. But I have only just thought of a nice way of explaining it, so I thought I would write it up.

The Fourth Wall

In theatre and cinema there is a concept called “the fourth wall”. The idea is that characters are (often) in a room surrounded by walls. The audience can see three of the walls, but the fourth wall is the side of the stage where the audience are sitting. It expresses the idea that, for the characters in a play or film, the audience do not exist. The viewpoint from which the audience is watching is simply a plain wall or empty space.

The idea of fourth wall is most often referenced in the idea of “breaking the fourth wall”. This is where a character looks out of the screen and talks directly to the audience. This is a trick that is used to create a sense of connection with the audience or to problematize the fictional world of the story. It can range from Peter Pan asking the audience if they believe in fairies to Berthold Brecht’s raising critical consciousness in his audience, or Deadpool simply telling dirty jokes about other characters.

The idea that the audience do not exist in the story world is central to our idea of fiction. Breaking the fourth wall is a well used narrative technique but we normally see it as a “trick” that breaks the story world. Even in films and plays that do it, we never imagine that the audience is physically in the world of the story, the characters are simply talking to us outside of that world.

There is no fourth wall

But, as in many things, VR is different. In VR there is no fourth wall. We, the audience, are physically inside the story world. There is no metaphysical barrier separating us from the characters, we are in the room with them.

This is one of the most fundamental differences between film and VR that film makers have to get used to if they move into creating for VR. There are many differences, like the lack (or difficulty) of cuts and the lack of a frame, but in many ways these are symptoms of the basic lack of separation between the world of the story and the world of the audience: the lack of the fourth wall.

Inside Henry’s room

This, I think, was the problem with Henry. You watched Henry in his room. If it were a film you would have been watching Henry through the fourth wall of his house, but it was VR, so you are sitting inside inside his house.

However, it felt as if the story was designed as if there was a fourth wall. You are sitting in Henry’s house, but he doesn’t acknowledge you at all. He carries on as if you aren’t there. In fact, the story is all about how Henry is lonely and there is no one at his part, but you are there, sitting in his room and he doesn’t even notice you!

This creates a strange sensation. What are you doing there? You feel like an intruder into his private space and life, which I really found discomforting.

None of this would have been a problem in a film, because of the fourth wall, but in VR stories always need to account for the fact that the “audience” is inside the story space, and to explain why they are there.

This is part of a blog I have started to support learners on our Virtual Reality MOOC, if you want to learn more about VR, that is a good place to start. If you want to go into more depth, you might be interested in our Masters in Virtual and Augmented Reality at Goldsmiths’ University of London.