My favorite VR experience so far
My involvement with high-end VR experiences is still limited. That’s because my main gear is a Mac and making the jump to a powerful PC-based platform such as Oculus Rift or HTC Vive would be a costly step for which I’m not ready yet. Therefore, almost all my VR references come from mobile-based experiences.
What fascinates me the most about VR is its potential as a storytelling medium, that is, the way classical visual storytelling principles can be changed, adapted or broken through VR, and the new possibilities that emerge from this technology.
My favorite VR experience to this date is “The Displaced”, created by Here Be Dragons in partnership with the New York Times and Google. It tells the story of three refugee children and their tragic daily lives.
Regarding the pain of others*
One of the problems with human tragedies when portrayed by media is how easily people forget and become insensitive to them due to the proliferation of images. This experience shows that VR can be a powerful tool against that.
The Dispatched is a 360º movie in which we, as viewers, are placed in front of the children in their chaotic environments. There, we hear their stories of displacement from their own mouths while we stay at their side, testifying their routine and how they try to keep being children besides the context in which they live.
Some of the resources seem to be designed with the purpose to make us connect deeper with the story: at each introduction, we have the children looking us direct into the eye, as if fighting our propensity to look away. On a different moment, we are transposed to the interior of a simple boat in the middle of a swamp.
VR designers an producers often speak about how subtitles should be avoided because they tend to “break” the immersion provided by the medium. I don’t think that subtitles are such a detrimental resource in VR nor felt that “The Displaced” experience were in any way harmed by this resource. Perhaps I’m biased because, as a Portuguese speaker, I’m used with many subtitled content in different formats.
More to explore?
The “The Displaced” is quite linear in its conception and therefore does not explore some aspects that makes VR storytelling different, such as a certain degree of interactivity and the presence of multiple story elements at the same time. None of these diminish its value in any way, though.
*This is the title of a insightful book from Susan Sontag about our relationship with horrific images.
This article was made as one of the activities of the Udacity’s Nanodegree in VR Development.
