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Story-Without-End: A Narrative Structure for Open-World Cinematic VR

2023; Springer Science+Business Media; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1007/978-3-031-47655-6_20

1611-3349

Mohammadreza Mazarei,

Virtual Reality Applications and Impacts

This article briefs a PhD project in creative arts in which the practices were shaped by research on Gilles Deleuze articulation of cinematic narrative in the books Cinema1: movement-image (1986) and Cinema2: time-image (1989). The project intends to develop a narrative structure for interactive storytelling that is specific to the properties of Virtual Reality (VR) as a cinematic medium. The research focuses on developing a method for designing and integrating pre-recorded content into an interactive VR application. The outcome is an open-world Cinematic VR in which individuals can influence the VR system by wandering freely within the immersive setting of the movie. Three different research projects are conducted to investigate the conventions for interactive storytelling that are compatible with the means of communication provided by VR technologies. The results utilise the principles of constructing a story-world and generating cinematic narratives through reciprocal acts of a “wanderer audience”, a term used originally in this project, in exploring an original narrative structure, “story-without-end”. The project also concludes to a design of interactive cinematic VR, Déjà vu that examine the feasibility of constructing a virtual story-world without any specific ending. This article describes a standpoint over the terms of cinematic narrative and replicates Deleuzian ontology on relationship of time and space in an immersive cinematic experience to determine conventions for open-world cinematic VR. The project states perception condition for a “wanderer audience”, and the principle of designing tools for a “virtual body”, the avatar, who explore an “open story-world” and generate a “virtual duration” as the cinematic time that confirm a comprehensive story experience.