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By definition, the people that make interesting cinematic experiences in VR won't be "film makers". I don't know if we've created a job title for them yet. It's a completely different medium, with completely different advantages, drawbacks, and considerations. Applying film techniques in a virtual environment is not the right approach, as your examples demonstrate. The really compelling experiences in VR will embrace the constraints you mentioned, not try to emulate a medium in which they didn't exist. I went to New York a few months ago and saw a play called Sleep No More. It takes place across 5 floors of a warehouse, converted into an incredibly immersive series of sets. It's loosely-based on Hamlet, with multiple storylines playing out simultaneously in different parts of the hotel/hospital/graveyard/theatre. The audience wears fawkes-esque masks and is not allowed to speak, nor are they acknowledged by the actors in any way. You can wander anywhere you like, follow any actors you find interesting, rummage through drawers, read books you find lying around, etc. You really do feel like a ghost, and being able to move around the actors (or even leave the room, if you feel like it), is incredibly fun and interesting. It certainly didn't feel like a limitation. So maybe VR has more to learn from theatre (and specifically interactive theatre) than film? Food for thought. |
In general, narrative in VR has to be approached VERY differently to film. It's not just that the viewpoint's moving or that it's 360 degrees, it's also that the viewpoint has its own agency within the environment.
Of all the comparisons I've come up with, actually, pen-and-paper roleplaying games seem to be the most useful ones when discussing how to fit narrative into a VR context. There's a commonality of simulated world and tension between experience and narrative there that doesn't really exist anywhere else.