Exploring Environmental Storytelling Techniques in Expressive, Virtual Reality Documentary

This chapter considers the notion of environmental storytelling for VR through a close reading of three room-scale, non-fiction projects. In recent years, considerable academic criticism has been directed at 360-degree VR documentaries that have adopted the conventions of realist filmmaking, using lens-based technologies to capture live-action, or other tools to create photo-realistic environments based on the real world. Less academic work has considered abstract or expressive approaches that VR practitioners might adopt to communicate a subjective narrative experience of space and time, a gap that this chapter addresses. The concept of environmental storytelling as discussed in video games and theme park contexts (Carson, Environmental storytelling: creating immersive 3D worlds using lessons learned from the theme park industry. Gamasutra.com , Vol. 1, 2000; Jenkins, Game design as narrative architecture. Computer, 44(3), 11, 2004), is adopted as a framework to assist with this quest. The way that narrative might be enacted by the VR user, and/or how meaning might be embedded in objects in a 360-degree VR environment, is interrogated.