Immersive Media Lab
Four years, five use cases, a lot of headsets: what interactive storytelling can do in VR and AR — from live-action film to explaining surgery to patients.
- Year
- 2018–2022
- Role
- Research assistant, Interactive storytelling
The Immersive Media Lab was an interdisciplinary project with a simple premise: everybody was building VR and AR, but hardly anybody was asking what stories look like in there. So we asked — across five very different use cases. I worked on three of them.
Immersive Video Interaction. What happens to a film when the audience can turn around, look away, and make choices? We built a catalogue of live-action VR projects and took apart how they handle narrative and technical interaction — and then went looking for how people actually respond to different narrative structures.
Enlightening Patients with Augmented Reality. Patient education leaflets are where knowledge goes to die. We explored whether interactive storytelling in AR could explain medical procedures in a way people actually understand and remember. (Short answer: a story beats a leaflet. Long answer: it’s in the paper.)
Intermedia Motion Tracking in AR/VR. Motion capture turned dancers’ movements into digital avatars, which then performed inside immersive storytelling scenarios. My colleagues did genuinely spectacular, artistic things here; I helped build and analyse the stories around them.
This is the project where I went from intern to researcher — and where I learned that the most interesting part of new technology is rarely the technology.
Funded by the BMDW through the COIN programme.