It has always been my contention there are three perspectives to interactive storytelling experience:
With the new developments with AR/VR these days, most of the audience attention has been placed on the first and third perspectives. Today, I have just become aware of a new avenue for the second person perspective.
The folks from Sword Coast Legends and Wizards of the Coast are working on a Dungeons and Dragons RPG game experience on the computer. As the role players experience the dungeon in real time, a dungeon master (DM) is also manipulating the game experience concurrently with the players. Reminding that the DM does not necessarily want to destroy the gaming party, just make sure they are challenged sufficiently. Similarly, it is often the DM’s responsibility to deliver a fun playing experience for the players.
Within the interactive storytelling experience, A contributed second person perspective can really help to push the game and prevent it from getting stale along with upholding the fun factor of the experience. While the interactive storyworld experience is not exactly an RPG game, it can borrow some some of the same interactive components. It seems all that is in place with this RPG system is dungeon crawling and fighting. While this is fun for certain purists. Others will be seeking the interactive characters and dynamic experiences. An involved second person perspective can really help avoid the interactive storytelling experience prof devolving into porn.
While the information has been slow in coming, the bread crumbs cluing us in to what’s going on at Magic Leap are starting to formulate.
In this article by Rachel Metz for the MIT Technology Review, Magic Leap, we begin to start seeing the technology promised by Magic Leap. While most of the product is still in development, one can’t wonder how this technology will compete against Hololens by Microsoft. Both offer stereoscopic projection of images onto lenses embedded in a head mounted display. Both of these technologies seem to lend themselves to AR applications. I still have questions how well it will work with full VR uses.
I don’t want to be synical but I am still looking forward to full blown, fast and effective VR. Occulus appears to be the leader in this tech but still has far to go. In the realm if Interactive Storytelling, I still feel a full immersive experience is required to transport the user into an alternative story world. This technology is not without merit and I eagerly await its arrival. These are all great steps forward and the closer we can get the public moving towards the concepts of AR and VR the easier it will be to sell fully immersive Interactive Storytelling.
While this is not really so much to do with Interactive Storytelling it is a development of one of the key pieces of technology which I have said is necessary for the truely immersive, Interactive Storytelling experience.
I just found out about a new technology from Leap, (Not sure if this is Magic Leap or not?), that allows the user to see his or her own body withing the Immersive VR environment. Being able to see you own body, especially hands and arms assists with the immersive experience and places the user into the actual gameplay. Not only does this give the user a contextual reference within the VR storyworld but also open the floodgate for endless GUI configurations. Long have a pondered how to provide sufficient GUI opportunities to the users without breaking the immersive experience. With this devise, the user’s body can now be the GUI.
To understand the potential of this technology, look at this youtube posting from pewdpie. I am so embarrassed to be referencing this chuckle head. But he does give an excellent demonstration of where this technology can go to.
This is really exiting stuff. I am so excited to start playing around with this and get things going.