User Responses: Studio 1, Folio 2 prototype

A short video documenting user responses to my Folio 2 VR experience prototype 'A Night in the Woods' via Oculus Go.

Documentation of the VR work can be found here.

This project aimed to further develop my understanding of how the medium of VR can be used to create engaging and emotional immersive experiences (ie. to better understand what techniques help provoke an emotional response from the user - which I believe will help me as a storyteller/filmmaker who is moving into VR).

To do this I focused on the feelings/themes of helplessness and vulnerability. These themes arose from Folio 1 where I became inspired by the folktale ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ and imagined a scene with a character alone in a forest. I also wanted quite strong emotions/themes to focus on because I thought it would help make the emotional responses more obvious and clear when testing responses.

 ‘A Night in the Woods’ is a one-minute audio-visual experience prototype that places the user in a dark, abstract and scary forest. The user’s sense of hopelessness and vulnerability are heightened through the disorienting use of shadows, spatial sounds (that the user can never see the source of) and importantly, the denial of the user’s ability to take any action (other than passive observation).

Before embarking on this project/folio, the storytelling potential of the VR medium was still relatively elusive to me.

Key learnings in this project included:
- That spatializing sound and vision gives the maker a greater degree of control over the user’s cognitive responses (compared to not spatializing it), which in turn means that if the maker can learn to master this, they will be more successful in provoking the desired emotions and reactions of their users, which is of particular interest to me as a storyteller.

The chance to experiment with spatializing sounds (such as wind, growling, footsteps/branches cracking, a baby crying etc) and then to try out the experience myself and on others helped me come to this conclusion.

For example, the question of what spatial sound could add or how it could enhance the emotional experience of ‘A Night in the Woods’ was still abstract to me before beginning this project, but as soon as we spatialized the baby crying sound for example, and I put on those headphones, I understood: Placing the baby out of sight but in an aurally specific location gave you, the user, a cognitive understanding of where the baby was (or should be). In turn, this not only turned your attention to that area of the 360 degree space, but also triggered a desire to find it and help it - which of course you could not do, only adding to your sense of helplessness. Plus not only were you now thinking about your own vulnerability, but also that of the baby’s - enhancing the feeling of vulnerability and a deeper sense of helplessness.

From this learning, one could hypothesise that a maker could use this knowledge in many other ways. For example, to enhance a user’s sense of empowerment the maker could place anything emotive in an aurally specific location and then give the user the chance to see or interact with it ie. enabling free choice/agency.

As a filmmaker this project was exciting (even though at times I admit I did question why I had chosen such dark themes to explore) because it helped me get closer to grips with VR storytelling. At its heart, I believe storytelling helps to connect us in the complex thing we call humanity; it can help us to process our emotions and better understand one another and; ultimately it can help call into question certain less desirable aspects of ourselves that need a mirror held up to them for a good long look. And I think XR/VR/AR are a great place to do this. I look forward to doing more in this space.