Digital Storytelling: Creating Stories For The Metaverse
We've looked at three events I consider ancestors to our modern AR and VR efforts, we've looked at some of the technologies, both hardware and software, we can use to create AR and VR experiences. Using beacons is easy. Telling stories with beacons, or any sort of AR and VR, gets more complicated. I've chosen to play with interactive story telling as a way to tell stories in the metaverse. Using tools like these allows me to build both the main stories and the branches for it... how we translate the stories is the real challenge. The more I think about it the more I come back to the tools of the story teller and, specifically, the tools of the LARP story teller. Whether it's [Nordic LARP](https://nordiclarp.org/what-is-nordic-larp/) or a modern set of rules like By Night Studio's [Vampire: The Masquerade](http://www.bynightstudios.com/vampire-the-masquerade/) and [Werewolf: The Apocalypse](http://www.bynightstudios.com/werewolf-the-apocalypse/) they provide a complete set of mechanics for you to use as-is or adapt to a virtual environment... We'll explore how the stories change as we move further into the VR field.  Working with beacons presents a straightforward challenge. How do we segment the story we want to tell while, at the same time, preserving the reader/participant's interest through a potentially long sequence of beacons. It's also important to remember that beacons only provide an access point. In and of themselves they will not give content to the user. This prompts the question: why use them? Beacons are the perfect advertisement and storytelling system. They make things we wouldn't normally associate with the web or the Internet into entry points to interacting with online content... as simple as a vending machine transaction or as complex as your imagination can make them. We can also have as many beacons as we want in a building or groups of buildings. Telling stories in AR is a little more complicated. Wherever we choose to tell the story we would seed the space with AR objects to help us tell stories. That introduces additional levels of complexity to our story telling: unless we control where a story is told we have no way to know what, if any, objects the actor/reader will interact with and in what order they will do so. Each of the elements in our story should stand on its own and help bring other important elements into the reader's view. Microsoft provides a good set of guidelines for users on how to create [shared holographic experiences](https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/mixed-reality/shared_holographic_experiences) that makes a good starting point We also need to be aware of how the devices themselves will affect the way people react and the ways and places where we tell the stories. Full VR is the most complex medium for telling stories but it's also the most rewarding. We can't take advantage of existing environments like we can with AR stories but we have to build the rooms, building and elements that we want our story to use. We also have to create bots and other interactions for the users. ## Single versus Multi User Stories AR stories also need some consideration regarding individual versus community (multiplayer) styles. Creating single reader stories is as simple as placing the content in the environment and providing ways for other devices to access the anchored elements and stories. Because we're placing the stories in physical places we also have to account for the usage of the place where we're telling the stories. A park is different than a coffee shop or a bar as a place to tell a story. When/if we decide to build a multi-user experiences we need to start considering how will people appear on each other's experiences like, if they will have the option of doing so and how will interactions change individual stories. Furthermore we need to consider if we'll need a server to handle player interactions and how will these interactions affect the individual stories. ## How does the narrative change when you're fully immersed in the story? Writing a story for print or even web publication is one thing. When we put ourselves in the story by creating an avatar that will represent the reader and interact with the content of the world is something different. We need to consider what consequences will the body have in the virtual world. In a digital environment we can engage more than just your brain and your hands. Depending on how the environment is configured we may have a full technologically mediated presence exercise The International Society of Presence Research defined presence as: > ... \[A\] psychological state or subjective perception in which even though part or all of an individual’s current experience is generated by and/or filtered through human-made technology, part or all of the individual’s perception fails to accurately acknowledge the role of the technology in the experience. Except in the most extreme cases, the individual can indicate correctly that s/he is using the technology, but at *some level* and to *some degree*, her/his perceptions overlook that knowledge and objects, events, entities, and environments are perceived as if the technology was not involved in the experience. Experience is defined as a person’s observation of and/or interaction with objects, entities, and/or events in her/his environment; perception, the result of perceiving, is defined as a meaningful interpretation of experience. > > International Society for Presence Research. (2000). The Concept of Presence: Explication Statement. Retrieved April 30, 2017 from [https://ispr.info/](https://ispr.info/) How much do we want to push the presence that we create in our stories? How much do we want to "fool" our users into thinking the objects and interactions we provide are real, or at least, that they are real enough to warrant suspension of disbelief for as long as they are engaged with our content? How do we represent the character's physical interactions? It would be tempting to attempt to make a full body avatar of the user and provide full body tracking to translate the player's movement into the Avatar's actions and how he/she interacts with the content we create for them. We also need to be mindful to represent the user as close as he/she is. Unless we can create avatars that directly represent the player or provide generic enough models of the user's presence in the world we may be better off with providing less presence or doing so in such a way where only parts of the body are visible.