STORYWORLDS IN VIRTUAL REALITY

The project consists in the building of a fiction world and creation of a virtual reality (VR) experience, exploring the potential of this medium for immersion and storytelling. An original fiction world was used: Offland, which is a fantasy approach to the western genre, centered around an inhospitable wasteland. We worked lightly in the world building of maps, regions, civilizations, races and cultures, the project is based on McDowell's methodology, in which the design of a world precedes the telling of a story. The VR experience portrays one specific scenario of an illusion inducing oasis, centering the experience in exploration, survival and altered states of mind such as hallucinations. The Virtual Environment serves us as a sandbox to test different moments and experiences, to answer in what ways fiction storytelling can be enhanced by virtual reality's interactivity. We interpreted Brett Leonard's concept of Storyworlding through short narratives distributed through the space, in which the user participates naturally through interaction with the environment, The virtual experience also explores user participation, allowing for users to leave voice recordings for the next users, and creating a more collective narrative. Through user testing we found that the experience should start with a goal to guide exploration, balancing linearity and nonlinearity allows for a narrative that's both comprehensive and engaging, the lack of characters or their representation causes little emotion and empathy, details make the fictional world more discernible, and participation should not be forced, it should feel simple to the user. The project expects more iterations and testing sessions, as it will benefit the VR storytelling community with more practical and solid guidelines.