We created a pre-show experience in Virtual Reality for the theatrical play The Next Fairytale (TNFT).
Theater plays a fundamental role in showing diverse stories, entertaining audiences, and connecting audiences to the story emotionally. It plays a crucial role in our cultural development. VR helps transport people into another world and leave behind the real world. We leveraged this aspect to encourage roleplay and a feeling of being inside the story.
After studying current solutions such as cirque de soleil and the circle of life, we found that within this niche area, most solutions target a 360 view of the play. We felt that these solutions do not connect audience emotionally with the actors and the story.
Our solution: Viewers enter the system as a character from the play and interact with other characters. We hope that people are able to transform, take this new identity and empathize with the characters of play as they step into the fairytale world
Backgrounds: TNFT is a fairytale story, where two prince fall in love with each other. The queen of fairy godmothers – Minerva tries to sabotage their love as she believes that a prince must only marry a princess.
Our experience gives a glimpse in Minerva’s life from many years ago. Our goal was to help viewers develop empathy for the antagonist Minerva and understand her viewpoint. The viewer goes into the experience as Minerva’s sister, Calliope and talks to Minerva about Minerva’s life decision of choosing her duty, over marrying the love of her life, king Arthur.
Steps:
We recruited participants through convenience sampling and there were no limitations except for the ability to comprehend English. Among the 12 participants recruited, 50% were female and 50% were male. Ages of the participants ranged from 18-34. Our participants had high school, undergraduate and graduate levels of education. Most participants were either interested in theater or had previous experience in VR or both.
Sessions were conducted in the lab and lasted for a duration of one hour each. According to the study protocol, the participants were first given story context and an overview of the basic interactions followed by a short practice session that allowed them to practice teleport and grabbing objects in VR. Once the participants signaled that they were ready, they were taken to the main VR experience which lasted from 7-10 minutes. We asked the participants to think aloud and took observation notes. The experience was followed by a short survey and a semi-structured interview where we asked them to reflect upon their experience and walk us through their understanding of the system. We analyzed the interview transcripts and the think aloud notes taken during the session, starting with open coding and then moving into axial coding.
All team members coded transcripts independently and reviewed each other’s codes collaboratively. This helped us with intercoder convergence and provided a reliability check. We identified and categorized patterns in our interviews and derived broader themes. We then visualized the data on a whiteboard to make connections between the various codes and themes. Based on what we learnt in our findings, we conducted brainstorming sessions and redesign exercises to inform our design recommendations.
We found our users were spread across this spectrum, from just being a player to getting into the skin of the character. (Not mutually exclusive).
Maintaining role play is important to both retain and encourage users to role play - help them ease in to the character.
Our design should also signify or clarify agency that the system provides - for example instead of tapping spells, having spell potions that users should pick up and ‘drink’, would be more embodied - that action signifies their agency over self
Since we realised VR can be distracting, our design signifiers should help users to focus their attention especially when we intend them to learn
One very interesting finding is about how social interactions in VR mirrored real life interactions. It did not matter that Minerva was blocky figure - they treated her like a real person since they were having a conversation with her, and also this is enhanced in VR. Even people who were players or observers in the role spectrum displayed these norms. For example, users were confused about who talks first, felt uncomfortable/intimidated when they stood too close to her, and were concerned if they were playing with her feelings..
But this went beyond typical social norms - people (role playing) were mirroring real life conversations to the extent of caring for Minerva, being sensitive to Minerva, and her feelings. Few users admitted that they felt responsible for her. We can see this in the way they used positive and negative emotions… they were more concerned about its effect on Minerva.
This finding helped us realize that designing for social interactions in VR in a way that it mirrors real life is really important. We need to take care of general norms so that we avoid encounters in VR that can make users feel really uncomfortable. Some design ideas are thought of to enhance social interactions in VR, like encouraging good behaviors and sympathizing.( such as Minerva's cheering up after the user touches her comfortingly, giving her flowers or tissues...)
Participants need time to understand what spells are for and their effects to make meaningful decisions.
Some strong visual signifiers that worked were - Minerva’s dress, stance
Decision making was exploratory in the start, participants randomly picked up spells to see the effects. Some even wanted to try them out on themselves first to learn how spells worked
Few participants felt overwhelmed by the experience due several reasons such as being new to VR space, learning new interactions, paying attention to conversation, taking up Calliope’s role, understanding spell effects
The design recommendations that we propose are: leverage exploration in VR to get into character’s role, demarcate areas of exploration with strategic layout, utilize seamless constraints , give user agency to ask for help, have clear conversation arcs to help users ease in and guide the flow, learning with inconsequential actions.
