I was reading through my web pages this morning and two very similar articles came up. I had written neither as being significant enough to create a post for. However, when I realized these were two very different article dealing with similar issues it made me think of the relevance they will have in immersive experiences.
The first of these was a video from the Oculus studio discussing the emotional relevance and importance of their new short called Henry. They discuss the importance of creating rapport with the audience and making them care about the protagonist. They further mention that this task is all the more important when dealing with VR. Because of VR’s immersive potential, audiences will demand a strong emotional connection with its characters.
The second article was written by Matthew Code on the replayability of games. While he is primarily talking about games I could not help but think that replay is one of the primary motivations behind immersive VR experiences. Matthew writes about what he thought makes game replayable. While we would agree that the lighter more commedic the game is the more attractive it is to watch again. But He also goes on to explain that sometimes characters are just so interesting you want to immerse yourself in their existence. There was the connection between the two articles.
Neither of the articles really suggests how to do these things but identifies the need to have them present for an enriching, replayable experience. These will be some of the milestones we need to achieve when developing immersive theme-world experiences.
