Interactive characters for virtual reality stories

Abstract

Virtual Reality (VR) content production is now a flourishing industry. The specifics of VR, as opposed to videogames or movies, allow for a content format where users experience, at the same time, the narrative richness characteristic of movies and theatre plays with interactive engagement. To create such a content format some technical challenges still need to be solved, the main being the need for a new generation of animation engines that can deliver interactive characters appropriate for narrative-focused VR interactive content. We review the main assumptions of this approach and recent progress in interactive character animation techniques that seems promising to realise this goal.