Where To Look? Sustaining Presence While Directing Attention in Virtual Reality Stories

Abstract

Humans have been fascinated with the notion of submerging themselves in other spaces since antiquity, or even before. As the contemporary media landscape seeks to employ newer immersive practices, particularly in today’s Metaverse environment, storytelling in immersive media such as virtual reality (VR) is still developing and being described. The notion of scale and (newfound) viewer agency afforded by VR has challenged VR film-makers, particularly in directing attention towards story beats and handling user interaction. The video gaming industry, as a platform that is built with immersion as the core of the experience, leads this development. The advent of virtual reality (VR) video games is developing an amalgamation of immersive strategies to induce the sense of presence within virtual worlds. In this article I look at current approaches and challenges faced when directing attention in films and storytelling in VR. I then consider strides taken in VR video games, namely Half-Life: Alyx (2020), to propose that directing techniques and immersive strategies employed in VR video games can be used to develop new strategies in VR films and storytelling.