Does Interactivity Make VR Feel More Real?
My master’s thesis: one five-minute 180° VR film in two versions — linear and interactive — to find out whether choices change how present you feel.
- Role
- Solo producer, Researcher
Interactive storytelling is not new. Choose-your-own-adventure books were doing it in the seventies, and the fanciest graphics engine still owes them a thank-you note. Virtual reality, on the other hand, can do something books can’t: make you feel like you’re there. VR researchers call that feeling presence, and they are slightly obsessed with it.
My master’s thesis in Digital Media Production put the two together and asked: if you let people make choices inside a VR film, do they feel more present?
To find out, I produced a five-minute 180° VR short film entirely on my own, in two versions: one linear, one interactive. Then I put people in headsets and measured how present they felt.
Making the same film twice on purpose is a strange experience. Every scene has to work both as fate and as choice. I learned more about dramaturgy from that than from any textbook — and if you’d like to know what the user test showed, get in touch. I’m happy to talk about it at length. Possibly too much length.