At the moment VR resembles video games more than cinema. Creators in that medium are already familiar with the prospect of telling stories and design experiences that live in 360°. Yet it is only in the past few years that great stories have been made by forging empathic connections between their audiences (players) and the work. Titles like Bioshock showed how a literary sense of perspective could be used to play head games with the player. Last year’s Gone Home used some of the same narrative tools in the fashion of a memory play. The emerging discipline of immersive theatre has even more to offer virtual reality experiences than video games. The most famed immersive–Sleep No More–is a masterwork of design and choreography. In the “sandbox” environment of the fictional McKittrick Hotel patrons can go virtually anywhere at any time. The design challenge becomes how to harness the patron’s attention. This isn’t a problem for most proscenium-based shows. If the audience isn’t looking at what’s going on inside the frame it is due to sheer incompetence on the part of the director. For immersive theatre this challenge is faced with every heartbeat. While it is still easy to get lost in Sleep No More (take it from me, I got totally lost) the environment rewards wanderers with a lunatic attention to detail. Layer upon layer of meaning is crammed into the space through set,sound and lighting design. That level of richness is how the illusion of “presence” is achieved there.
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